ZANDVOORT 1994 On Saturday September 17th 1994 the 6th MSX Computerday was held in the Pellikaanhal, Zandvoort, Netherlands. The fairs in Tilburg and Zandvoort are the most important MSX happenings in the Netherlands. Tilburg has always been more successful than Zandvoort, and this year this was clearer than ever. In Tilburg there were 1500 paying visitors, in Zandvoort 750. If you count the people behind the stands, there were still more than 1000 MSX users from all over Europe in the Pellikaanhal, but Tilburg had twice as many visitors. But what are we complaining about? There were about 20 visitors at a meeting in Oslo a few weeks ago, and in Spain they are very happy if 100 MSXers attend their biannual meetings in Barcelona. There was enough to be seen in Zandvoort this year anyway, below I'll give an overview of the most important stands in alphabetical order. COMPJOETANIA This enthuastic group from the south of the Netherlands released their first megademo called "The Last Dimension" (NLG 10). It is not as stunning as "Unknown Reality" by NOP (released in Tilburg), but it does have some very nice effects. My favourite part is the ending with the heads. As a bonus this disk has a music player with a lot of very nice MoonBlaster songs. A new assembler for MSX called Compass (COMPjoetania ASSembler) had been announced but was not finished. This assembler has a lot of functions including monitor, debugger and disassembler and it can use all the available RAM for sources. Compjoetania hopes to release in in the beginning of 1995. Their new projects will support Moonsound and Graphics 9000. EMPHASYS These guys are going to stop with their very nice diskmagazine called "The Golden Power Disc". GPD#10 was released in Tilburg (March 26th 1994), GPD#11 was released here. And it's supposed to be bimonthly! GPD#12 will be the last issue of the Golden Power Disc, but I don't know when it will be released. The Rune Master clone "Ducktales" was not finished in Tilburg, it was postponed to Zandvoort. Although it was sold in Zandvoort (NLG 25), it was not completely finished yet and still had some bugs. Magica steals Dagobert's Magical Dime, and he has to travel through three dangerous worlds to get it back. This game has very nice demo graphics, the gfx of the game itself are not that good. Ducktales is a co-production of Emphasys and Overflow!, another product of Overflow! that was supposed to be released in Zandvoort was Coverflow, a disk full of covers of game music for MSX-MUSIC/MSX-AUDIO. Unfortunately this disk wasn't finished either, it was released in Almelo (October 1st) instead (NLG 7,50). It has very nice graphics and nice music. FONY This group from Harderwijk finally released their first game "Eggbert" (NLG 20). I'm not sure, but I think this game can take over the "Most Postponed Game Award" from Trojka (by BCF). It is a very nice game in which Eggbert has to find back the eggs that were stolen while he was supposed to be 'eggsitting' them. Some of the puzzles are very difficult, and this game has some very original items. FUTUREDISK The FutureDisk was a bit back on schedule, so they released two disks in Zandvoort: FD#15 and FD#16. FD#16 is not a normal FutureDisk, but a Storydisk, with a compilation of all the game stories published on the FutureDisk so far. These are the game stories of Japanese games like the Xak series, Ys series and Illusion City. FD#15 has something special too: Street Snatch, a battle game with graphics from SD Snatcher for two players. Due to some internal conflicts in the FD staff this game was not as good as it should have been, but it was nice enough anyway for a bonus on a diskmagazine. HEGEGA The group who made "Teachers Terror" released their new game called "Bet Your Life" (NLG 20). It should have been released in Tilburg like so many other games. I haven't played this game yet, but what I saw on the Hegega stand looked a bit confusing, a lot of ghosts moving around on the screen? The only thing I know is that it's an action game. IOD/FUC At the stand of Instrument of Darkness (Belgium) and French United Coders (Hmmm, what country are they from?) a new drawing program for SCREEN 11 was released with the logical title "SCREEN 11 Designer" (NLG 40). It is actually released by Sunrise, but we didn't have enough room on our stand to promote it properly, so FUC (who made it) put it on their own stand. The nice thing of SCREEN 11 is that you can use a lot of colours (12,499) without the colour spill problems of SCREEN 12. IOD didn't have a new product. After the fair I heard they had demonstrated some Brazilian MSX software, but I didn't see anything of it. MSX CLUB ENSCHEDE This club from Enschede (really?!) released a new drawing program called "AGE8" (NLG 35). AGE is the best drawing program for SCREEN 5 (by T&E Soft, it's a part of DD-Graph), and the guys from Enschede thought their should be a (very) similar program for SCREEN 8. MSX CLUB GOUDA The shocking news of the fair was the announcement of Gouda that they are going to stop with most of their MSX activities. Officially they are not stopping completely, but I know from experience that clubs who don't stop completely 'bleed to death' quite fast (BCF, ANMA, MSX-Engine). They tried to sell most of their stock at low prices, it didn't surprise me that they didn't have any new products. MCCM Of course MSX Computer & Club Magazine, the last large magazine for the Dutch MSX users, had a stand it Zandvoort. Unfortunately MCCM 70, which announced the fair, arrived at most subscribers on the same Saturday, this may be the reason why some people forgot to go to the fair... They only had a small stock of this latest issue at their stand, it was sold out very soon. TILBURG The MSX usergroup from Tilburg call themselves "the" MSX User Group, and I think they deserve that title for organizing the best MSX fair in Europe or maybe all over the world. They don't release exciting new games or something like that, but who cares? The work they do is very important. The next fair in Tilburg will be on Saturday April 8th 1995, don't miss it! MSX-HANDLERGEMEINSCHAFT Our friends from Switzerland, Germany and Denmark had a (too small) stand next to us, and promoted their hardware projects (CD-ROM, removable harddisk and of course V9990 and OPL4). Spending a fair with Peter, Henrik, Michi, Andr and the others is always great fun. We can't wait for Tilburg! MSX-CLUB WEST-FRIESLAND After the success of "Zeeslag" in Tilburg, Bas released a new game for two computers called "Veldslag" (NLG 30) (I think the normal title for this game is "Stratego" in English too?). And of course he had a lot of hardware stuff as usual. NOP They stunned everybody with their Unknown Reality in Tilburg, nobody thought so many new effects were possible on the ancient MSX2. This time they released a program called "Traxplayer", that can play samples directly from disk. Unfortunately it doesn't work on turbo R (yet). OASIS It is a tradition by now that Oasis releases some new patch disks for Japanese games on each important fair. This time they released patches for Fray (MSX2 version) and RuneMaster 1 and 3 (both NLG 25). STICHTING SUNRISE Without bragging I can say that our stand was one of the most busy stands all day. No wonder, because we demonstrated both the new videochip ("Graphics 9000" with V9990) and the new soundchip ("Moonsound" with OPL4) for MSX. On top of that, we released "Retaliator" (NLG 35) and "SCREEN 11 Designer". I already told you about SCREEN 11 Designer in the part about the IOD/FUC stand. Retaliator is a great shoot-em-up game by Jan van Valburg. It looks a lot like Space Manbow and it has superb music. To show the speed of the V9990, we showed the same graphical BASIC programs on an MSX2 (with normal videochip) and on a turbo R (with V9990). The difference in speed is really amazing! To demonstrate the OPL4, Henrik played a lot of standard MIDI files. Most people did not believe that wonderful sound came out of an MSX! In Zandvoort it was possible to order Moonsound for NLG 349 and Graphics 9000 for NLG 399. At the end of the day 34 Graphic 9000's and 59 Moonsounds were ordered! This is really amazing if you consider that we couldn't even show the actual Moonsound and Graphics 9000 to the people yet! At the moment I'm writing this the first series of 100 Moonsounds and 50 Graphics 9000's are completely sold out, before they are produced! The next series will be available in Tilburg, don't forget to reserve a Moonsound and/or Graphics 9000 if you want to be sure you'll be able to buy one there! TYFOON This group is working on a Graphical User Interface for MSX2 called Windows Operating System (WOS). Unfortunately it doesn't look very appealing yet because of the terrible colours. VIVID This group finally released their game "Solid Snail" (NLG 32,50), that was announced more than a year ago. Unfortunately it still does not work on a turbo R. It is a nice arcade adventure with great graphics. XELASOFT/QUADRIVIUM This group (XelaSoft is the most important part of Quadrivium) released two programs for turbo R only (!): MODedit and Zone Terra (both NLG 35). With MODedit you can edit (and play) 4-channel MOD files. Zone Terra is a shoot em up game in SCREEN 12. The background is a digi that scrolls very, very slowly, to give the game some more speed a multi layer star scroll was added. This game has a lot of action and is quite hard. Zone Terra has stero music (MSX-MUSIC/MSX-AUDIO) and PCM soundeffects. Well, that's all folks! Of course there were more stands, but I'm only talking about the most interesting ones here. After the fair we had dinner in a Chinese restaurant to celebrate the success of Moonsound and Graphics 9000 with the MSX-Handlergemeinschaft guys. Of course we had a great time. I'm already looking forward to the next fair! Stefan Boer (c) Stichting Sunrise 1994