Hello everybody, Here comes my story of Tilburg... I woke up at 5 in the morning and got dressed in my favourite FONY/ fair clothes. After that I collected the other FONY members (inluding a brand new one who had never seen an MSX fair). At 6:30 we were on the highway (A28 if you would like to know) and we were all eggcited :-) about this great day. At 8:00 we arrived in Tilburg and we unloaded our stuff and put it on our stand. We planned to show some things for the GFX 9000 (V9990) and sell Eggbert (our nice game), I also had some hardware to sell. At 9:00 our stand was finished and we could have a look at the other stands. Emphasys and Overflow had a stand next to ours. They were selling some kind of MIDI moonblaster program and Coverflow, a music disk. Offcourse we wanted to know if Moonsound was available, but first we looked at the Mayhem stand (Hi folks! When is the FM meeting?). They had some very sad news... Almost Real was almost finished, so they couldn't sell it. But they had some great disklabels! After this, we continued our journey to Sunrise. Stefan Boer was a little bit stressed up because of some melt down in his Turbo R(s). Henrik Gilvad could save him from braking down the stand and everybody near to him and fixed it. A big surprise for us, was that the Moonsound was really (REALLY) finished. Everybody wanted to have one and Stefan went crazy again. They had 100 Moonsounds, but some didn't work. The only thing Henrik did for the rest of the day was fixing and testing Moonsounds... Offcourse I bought myself a nice Moonsound cartridge and finally I could feel it in my hands... (after half a year!) We tested it right away at our own stand, but... it didn't work! Hmm, maybe my computer was wrong, earlier that day my slot 3.1 had died, so I thought it was my computer that didn't want to work. So we tried it on another computer, it didn't work... HELP Stefan! We want to hear Moonsounds! Henrik tested it on his Turbo R and everything worked well... So we went to Remco Schrijvers (programmer of Moonblaster for Moonsound, you know: Moonsoft). He said that he had tested it on Turbo R, but also on Philips computers... (which we have) Remco took a deep breath and asked where the program stopped. At the sample ram test, I said. Hmmm, well... uhhh that is the part I only tested on Turbo R... Then that must be it! Please remove the bug, I begged. Remco, as calm as he always is, asked for a computer and debugger. So we went to our stand and he fixed the bug. It was a big relief to him that it was so easy to remove. (I know how it feals to discover a bug in your program, when at least 25 people bought it allready...). During this 'incident', lots of visotors were coming in. It was really crowded, at some moments I couldn't even walk back to our stand. Things were selling well, at our own stand. The hardware was gone in no time (except for a Music module and a Philips 8250, somebody interested?) Even Eggbert sold more than we expected (enough to pay our stand and car and to have a little profit (which was gone in no time, because Moonsound had to be paid)). As everyboudy knows it is Easter. Eggbert is about eggs, so it was not so difficult to combine this to a stand full of chocolate eggs. We dumped 2.5 kilo eggs on our stand and everybody could take one or two (or hundred, ANNE!!!). At 13:00 I discovered that I hadn't seen the rest of the stands, so I went off again to look at everything that was around. I saw an MSX emulator board for PC for only Fl 75,- and another one for Fl 225,- !!! (hi Hessel). I will not list all of the stands here, that would be to much, but I will tell you about things that attracted me... Compjoetania had a great music disk, the music is nice, but the end demo is great! Scaling and rotating grafix, really cool! MCCM sold an MSX 2 emulator. I tried it and it is very fast (on 80 Mhz DX2) but I don't hear any sounds... (Eggbert works on it, now I can show it to everybody who asks why I have computer eyes) MSX club Gouda sold MSX fans for only Fl 10,- great price! Their SCSI interface should have been a great succes, when they had put DOS 2.20 on the EPROM. Sadly they hadn't done that for some vage reason about speed... it sounded very strange to me, but I will not buy it, until it has DOS 2.20 on it (it's very fast, 225 Kb/s on 7 Mhz MSX, but I can live with 60 Kb/s using my Bert SCSI). It could have been so wonderful... MSX club West-Friesland sold their third multi-player-computer game. Again the grafix were astonishing (awfull), but the game was fun. It was some sort of tetris with two players. I also saw Xelasoft with a great stand, lights and everything. They (he) were (was) selling his shooting game for Turbo R. Oasis had a nice Dragon SLlayer 6 to english patch. I only like the demo of this game, so I didn't buy it. The other FONY member was completely eggcited about it, so he bought it... Sunrise (swiss) sold the great Moonsound cartridge. They also had some presentations about the GFX 9000. Remco Schrijvers was showing his MOD-player for the Moonsound. The Shrines of Enigma was the first game of the games subscribtion. It had a very nice disklabel with gold and silver texts. Hessel Harmsen sold a big pile of MSX junk and asked lots of money for it. Which he really got from some people because he is a great salesman. He even sold 'the ideal computer case', I don't know what it was, but it was big and bigger and very big with some connectors and stuff. There also was somebody who made a scanner interface, nice for DP people. Well, don't be angry when you are not listed above, I don't have a great memory, so... at least I can say that it was a great fair. There is only one thing that is not so great, for people with stands, this day was great. Everybody knwos each other and you can talk about MSX all day... but for visitors it was a bit less fun. There were no really new things to see. No MK with great new hardware (or Digital KC). MSX Club Gouda only had some dump sale of old stuff, no really great new games that were not mentioned before. It looked like a big computer club for MSX groups. I know, Moonsound is great, but I have waited half a year for that, so that was no new thing (The only really great thing was that Moonsound works well on 7 Mhz... moonsound+GFX 9000+ 7 Mhz/ R800 = WOW!!!). Over to the end part of this story. At 17:00 it was all over :-( Stands were being ripped to parts and we dumped everything in our car again. Together with Mayhem and some others we went to the local McDonalds. Somebody decided to leave tha car at the fair and walk to the McDonalds... after half an hour we finally arrived and we were starved to death. All mexican-something-burgers were ordered and the MSX party continued. After all, it was a great day, and everybody in the world who has an MSX should come next year and also to Zandvoort. Our new FONY member is all freaked up about MSX now (He owns an AMIGA 1200) and he loves Moonsound! I feel very sorry for everybody outside Holland who couldn't come. I think you feel really terrible now and wish you were Dutch... But don't commit suicide... because there is hope! I saw somebody with a camera and I think he was from Brazil, so all South Amarican people can see a video off the fair. I made pictures and they will be put on Photo-CD. I will send a message when it is finished. Maybe I put the pictures on FTP. Sadly I have no free access to internet, so I must think of a way to get temporarily free access to upload it (Hi Zelly, maybe I can come to the TUE?) Well, that was it. We wish you happy MSXing and if you want chocolate eggs, just come to Harderwijk! (not you ANNE) -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- SSFONY@XS4ALL.NL = Stephan Szarafinski, The Netherlands /--- /--\ | | | | |--- | | |\ | |__| MSX Freak --> Games coder and contactperson for FONY | | | | \| | | \--/ | | \--/ Atari Falcon 030 user --> Who can teach me how to program this thing? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-