Rehearsing help from my msx
February 17, 2025
Consider the following musical fragment:
Schönberg, Verklärte Nacht, first violin, m171-185
For our last project, we split our orchestra in two. The wind section performed Mozart’s Gran Partita while the strings were playing Arnold Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht. The latter is one of the most difficult pieces I’ve had to master for this orchestra. Having played the violin since I was very young, I’ve never been afraid of heights, so to speak, and this piece is even from Schonberg’s tonal period. Still, when in measure 170 the melody climbs well above the bar, the chromatics become disorienting quite fast.
Whenever I encounter something like this, I have a secret trick, and it involves a bit of coding on an MSX:
10 ’Schoenberg, Verklaerte Nacht
20 ’175
30 PLAY "t60"
40 PLAY "o5l8e-.l16dl4a-.l8gc-b-"
50 PLAY "o5l8e-.l16dl4a-.l8gc-b-"
60 PLAY "o5l8e-.l16dl4a-.l8gc-b-"
70 PLAY "l8d-cag#o4bb-o5gf#"
80 PLAY "t90"
90 PLAY "l8fdo4ba-do3bg#fdfg#b"
100 PLAY "o4dfg#bo3bo4dfg#bo5do4g#o5f"
In MSX BASIC there is the PLAY command, that accepts a string that it translates into commands for the internal sound chip. That string is just codified musical notation, so it’s really easy to type in a fragment like the one above. The characters A through G will play the according note, t<x> will set the tempo in x beats per minute, just like my metronome, o<x> will change the octave to x (1-8) and l<x> will set the length of each subsequent note to 1/xth of a full 4/4 measure. Following a note with a minus or pound sign will flatten or sharpen it and a dot will add one half of its length. If you compare the notes with the code, you can see I’ve started coding at measure 175. Sadly, MSX BASIC doesn’t know about triplets, so I had to cheat by changing the tempo in line 80.
Coding this costs me a few minutes and when it’s done, I can play it in a low tempo until I have the melody firmly in my head and I can focus on rehearsing it to get it in tune. It’s a really effective method, and I’ve been doing as long as I can remember. My father, who was a musical teacher and choir conductor, used an Atari ST with Notator Alpha to do the same thing, but turning on an MSX will immediately land you in BASIC and to me, typing these strings with commands is faster than dragging the notes onto a bar with an Atari Mouse. My father used a keyboard attached to the Atari’s MIDI ports, of course, but I’m lousy at playing the piano, so for me that’s hardly an option.
On an Atari, putting in the floppy and waiting for the program to load, was all that required your patience. Starting a MIDI environment, with or without a MIDI attached keyboard, on a modern PC, is even more involved. And that is why, as far I know, nothing beats my MSX BASIC solution in sheer effectiveness.
Retros for adults
February 13, 2025
I have been working as a programmer at the Dutch Railways (NS) for three years. In my team, we work, of course, Agile/Scrum with three-weekly sprints, the daily standup and other meetings such as reviews and retrospectives (retros). Especially those retros always used to last a very long time and were often overly imaginative. Role plays, expressing feelings with lego, everything came along. I just participated, but I didn’t always feel really taken seriously. And if anything was learned from it, it was forgotten five sprints later. But in this, our retros did not differ from what I was used to from other employers.
When I started at NS, I landed in a large team of about fourteen people. We had a product owner, a full-time scrum master, a UX designer, an architect and a few testers. About half of the team were programmers, including myself. With that team, we worked on a growing number of APIs built in Dotnet, Java and Kotlin, which mainly ensured that people could rent one of our 20,500 nation-wide available OV-bikes or park their own bikes in our bicycle parking garages. At first glance, this is not a very complex matter, but if analysts and other colleagues are allowed to come up with sub-products for seven years, then more and more code has to be added. So much more, in fact, that those APIs continued to grow in number and size to such an extent that we slowly lost control.
A bicycle parking at a train station
For six months now, under the guidance of a new architect, we have been working on a project to make the APIs a bit more specific again and to split the team in two workable ones. However, this coincides with a budgetary problem, so it has been decided that all teams of the department have to make do with a total of two scrum masters. They won’t have time for retrospectives any more, so we have to do those on our own now.
The first thing we decided was to keep them simple from now on. Two columns with post-its: one for what went well and one for what could be improved. No more lego. One of my team members called it retros for adults. I don't know about that, but it's certainly refreshing.
Perhaps we'll even learn a thing or two from them.
The internet does not depend on ads
February 10, 2025
In a blog post called Evolving Together: Redefining Mozilla in the AI Era, Mozilla president Mark Surman states that Mozilla is restructuring because it needs to diversify its revenue stream. That’s fair enough, but I have doubts with their two-prong solution being A.I. and privacy respecting ads.
First, open source A.I. is a tricky thing, because both the code base and the training data need to be open source for it, which means users need to be able to inspect, fork and change them and contribute to them. For the massive amounts of data required for an LLM to function at least a little, that’s hardly imaginable.
But what I really can’t agree with is the statement that the web needs free (as in gratis) content and that without advertisements, this can’t be. My point, see this blog (perhaps not including this particular rant). Not only does it not have ads, I daresay most of its content has a lot more originality and quality than all those well-SEO’d (Search Engine Optimised) sites that pop up on top when you do a Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo or any other online search.
A bill board advertising SEO next to a traffic jam. It reads “We know Google’s secret”
They don't raise the bar high, though. When comparing sites like GeeksForGeeks, Hackr.io, Medium, DigitalOcean and others they seem to just scrape sites with actual original content, and each other, to repeat it, often incorrectly, decorated with ads and other trackers. They’re getting search engines to put them high up in the results, overwhelming the user and thereby preventing them to find useful content. The ad-sustained free internet model that Surman talks about inherently makes it so that sites must work like this to increase their income.
Meanwhile I pay for my newspaper, for Nebula and other online services that I use without going via a search engine, and they do in fact deliver quality, without SEO and mostly without ads. So while the part of the free internet that is sustained by ads is useless, if not unbearable, others, like those found on the indieweb, actually produce original content for free without needing ads, instead often being sustained by donations. I would be perfectly willing to buy a licence to use Firefox or another browser, based on the quality of its product. In fact, I am paying for it, but I increasingly wonder why.
The free internet model is useless and obnoxious. Ads ruin the internet. It is better off without them.
Msx in all seriousness
February 06, 2025
As of late I’ve been binging this person’s videos and one I particularly enjoyed was one where they list their top five computers from between 1980 and 1985 and judge them on how good they were. Not per se for gaming, but for serious stuff, like word processing, programming, and general fitness for functioning in the (home) office or classroom. For that purpose, these machines need a proper keyboard, the right amount and types of output ports, an actual operating system and a well populated ecosystem with supporting hardware expansions and such. The original 48K ZX Spectrum came last. I find that hilarious, since Clive Sinclair famously marketed all of his machines as professional apparel and would have none of that silly gaming business. Honestly, I was surprised it even made the list, because it had precisely none of the requirements mentioned.
Retrobyte’s Top 5 Retro Computers (links to video)
A few days ago, while driving back home with my son after attending a concert given by his bassoon teacher, my son asked me if the MSX computers that he plays games on were ever used for other things than games, to which I responded with a resounding “yes”. Of course, I told him, there was no internet, but when I went to university, all I had was an MSX with a printer, so that’s what I used to hand in my essays. I didn’t need anything else, and for documentation you went to the library, not the internet. There was of course also programming, and online banking.
An ad from 1986 showing an MSX2 with a modem, connected to the BBS of the Postbank
When he asked me how you could do online banking without an internet connection, I told him about BBSes, but his questions made me go back to the video and wondered whether MSX computers were in fact available in the UK. There is the story about a ship full of Mitsubishi MSX computers from Japan heading for the UK but denied access by none less than the iron lady herself, to protect the UK’s home (computer) market. The ship found refuge in nearby Rotterdam, which is supposedly the only reason MSX as a product landed in the Netherlands the way it did1. And whether that story is true is not, landing it did, in such a way that the Postbank, which not much later merged with ING, saw fit to produce their own MSX modems so that their customers could use them to visit BBSes and do banking at home.
On this blog, I have dedicated a whole series of posts reviewing MSX word processors, and I didn’t even include Wordstar. Wordstar did run on MSX because MSX-DOS2 implemented almost all CP/M 2.2 calls. That fact was also the reason I could run Borland’s Turbo Pascal 3.0 IDE natively on my MSX. Any CP/M 3.0 software could run as well, but you’d have to boot into the OS first.
CP/M 3.0 booting on an MSX
MSX computers all had standard Centronics printer ports, many had RGB or SCART output to connect them to a monitor and some had very good keyboards, like the Spectravideo SVI-728, which was available in 1984 in the UK for £250,- and would tick all Retrobyte’s boxes, I suppose.
As mentioned, I did use MSX machines for over a decade to do my school and university assignments. I even had a little self-made program in BASIC that I used to learn foreign vocabulary. It had me ace those tests. MSX computers, especially when providing 80 columns per line on a text screen, were very capable machines for the small business or home office, right until internet became mandatory.
And then even that.
Notes
- This story was told by the late Wammes Witkop, editor-in-chief of MSX Computer Magazine when he was interviewed by The Retro Hour Podcast (episode 276).
The 512KB club
February 03, 2025
Below is a screenshot from the 3D first-person shooter Doom (id software, 1993):
Hurt me plenty
Doom is a game that would fit on a single CD-ROM, in other words, could be no bigger than 650MB. Doom has its own internal 3D engine, it has artwork, level designs, music and sound effects to keep the player occupied for quite some time, all within those 650MB.
I used to work at a bank. At my bank, we tried to sell loans to people so that they could buy second hand cars, mostly. We used a framework called Open Web Components to lead our future customer through a series of screens, at the end of which they either had or didn’t have the requested money in their account. It was all very customer-friendly and even more bank-friendly, but why I bring this up is that while the aspiring customer was clicking their way through our web components, their browser would be downloading data well in excess of what would fit on a single CD-ROM.
“The internet has become a bloated mess. Huge JavaScript libraries, countless client-side queries and overly complex frontend frameworks are par for the course these days.”
-- The 512 KB club’s mission statement
Now, one could argue that our human civilisation itself is a mess, if not a bloated mess, and that the 2025 internet experience is no more than well-deserved, but I personally am quite fond of small and elegant. The 512KB club lists a number of websites, sorted by how much data you need to download to consume their content, and the absolute winner with, according to Firefox, 30.82kB, is Ryan’s blog, although the 512KB club puts him in their green team at only 2.16kB. Perhaps they should update their score board more regularly, but 31 kB is still impressive and, I must say, much less than my own current 3.49MB.
I say current, because I always display my last five posts on my landing page, and how much data you download thus greatly depends on how many pictures these posts have. But I will never be a member, I realise, or will I?
If you navigate to the aforementioned Ryan’s blog, what you get is a very short landing page with a couple of buttons in the header. To see the actual blog, you need to click on a button, after which you see an index page, listing a couple dozen blog posts, displaying only their title, tag line and publication date. You need to click once more to get to the actual content. Clicking on Ryan’s last five posts, he still arrives at 231 kB, which would demote him to the orange team, so I do feel Ryan is cheating here. If you go to this post's own page, you'll see that even with the picture above, it’s only slightly above 412 kB, which at least would put me in their blue team.
The other reason Ryan's blog is so small of course is that the author uses no pictures, except for some icons. I do. Screenshots and other pictures serve as illustrations to my text. Including them in the article means that my readers don't have to open links in new tabs to see what I'm talking about, like I find myself doing with the first half of this blog post about some really outlandish modular laptops. This, by the way, is the exact reason I don’t have a mirroring Gemini or Gopher site. Especially the latter would allow me to consume my own site on my MSX. Of course there are clever ways of using ASCII art, but it’s not the same thing, and useless for my purpose.
So no, I will not apply for membership of the 512KB club, and not only because the k in kB should be in lower case. I do agree that most sites on the internet are bloated, and all that electricity being consumed just to convey a distinguishing company look is hardly sustainable. But I do think that my site sits at a nice middle ground, and I’m happy with that.