Hi all:
While clearing some old stuff from my parents' house, today was the turn for this little 8 bit gem.
What we have here is a Sony HB F700 MSX2 computer that was in some form one of the top of the line of Sony MSX 2 systems way back in the late eighties.
Unlike the majority of the MSX line that where all in one computers (keyboard and CPU) this one had a more professional looking setup with separate keyboard and a built in 3,5 inch DD floppy drive.
Some specs of this machine are :
CPU: Z80 running at 3,6 Mhz
RAM: 256KB RAM
Video Ram: 128KB
Its graphic abilities where on par to the rest of the MSX2 standard:max 256 colors on screen from a palette of 512 and resolutions up to 512×212 pixels.
Sound is provided by a Yamaha YM2149 3 voice programmable sound generator chip.
It starts directly to MSX basic but an OS existed also for these, it was the MSX DOS, that was in fact much like a 8 bit variant of some ancient version of the MS-DOS for 16bit PCs.
So lets go on, here it is, sat almost 12 years or so on a shelve collecting dust and gunk:
And its back:
Disk drive is absent as it was already faulty when it was given to me, back in those years I used an Amiga Chinon drive to work with it as this machines use the very same kind of drives as the amiga does (RDY signal enabled ones).
Here it is the original Disk drive:
Well so lets set it up, plug it to a TV and switch it on to see what happens: magic blue smoke ? , fireworks? , maybe the house's circuit breaker going nuts?
Nah, it started like a Champ :
Then the basic:
Note that this machine gives only B/W picture if the composite video output is used (maybe it does use NTSC color encoding?), for color an RGB to Scart cable is needed but I can't remember where it is, so only B/W fun this time.
Now lets try some random cartridge game:
Here it is, the mighty Konami's Nemesis 3, wit looooads of gunk on the connector so yup, it failed the first time.
After some cotton stab and alcohol cleaning here it goes:
Then some old school fun:
Well, there are lots of TLC to do to this machine, first of all this model have a battery backed RTC to store date on files while using the MSX-DOS, so considering It's a 1986 machine high are the chances that the battery is one of those Ni-Cd time bombs , I have to check ASAP.
So that's all for this time, hope you enjoyed this.
While clearing some old stuff from my parents' house, today was the turn for this little 8 bit gem.
What we have here is a Sony HB F700 MSX2 computer that was in some form one of the top of the line of Sony MSX 2 systems way back in the late eighties.
Unlike the majority of the MSX line that where all in one computers (keyboard and CPU) this one had a more professional looking setup with separate keyboard and a built in 3,5 inch DD floppy drive.
Some specs of this machine are :
CPU: Z80 running at 3,6 Mhz
RAM: 256KB RAM
Video Ram: 128KB
Its graphic abilities where on par to the rest of the MSX2 standard:max 256 colors on screen from a palette of 512 and resolutions up to 512×212 pixels.
Sound is provided by a Yamaha YM2149 3 voice programmable sound generator chip.
It starts directly to MSX basic but an OS existed also for these, it was the MSX DOS, that was in fact much like a 8 bit variant of some ancient version of the MS-DOS for 16bit PCs.
So lets go on, here it is, sat almost 12 years or so on a shelve collecting dust and gunk:
And its back:
Disk drive is absent as it was already faulty when it was given to me, back in those years I used an Amiga Chinon drive to work with it as this machines use the very same kind of drives as the amiga does (RDY signal enabled ones).
Here it is the original Disk drive:
Well so lets set it up, plug it to a TV and switch it on to see what happens: magic blue smoke ? , fireworks? , maybe the house's circuit breaker going nuts?
Nah, it started like a Champ :
Then the basic:
Note that this machine gives only B/W picture if the composite video output is used (maybe it does use NTSC color encoding?), for color an RGB to Scart cable is needed but I can't remember where it is, so only B/W fun this time.
Now lets try some random cartridge game:
Here it is, the mighty Konami's Nemesis 3, wit looooads of gunk on the connector so yup, it failed the first time.
After some cotton stab and alcohol cleaning here it goes:
Then some old school fun:
Well, there are lots of TLC to do to this machine, first of all this model have a battery backed RTC to store date on files while using the MSX-DOS, so considering It's a 1986 machine high are the chances that the battery is one of those Ni-Cd time bombs , I have to check ASAP.
So that's all for this time, hope you enjoyed this.
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