ABOUT
It was somewhere in 1986 when my dad bought a Philips VG8235 with a green screen, a printer and a hand full of disks. I never could have guessed how big the role of this machine, or the standard it's part of, was going to be in my life.
At first it was all about playing games on it, but it turned out this system was very inviting to be creative. This was mostly because of the long listings which were printed in the magazines, but also very much because of its very powerful built in Basic interpreter.
After a while it turned out many people in the neighborhood had an MSX. Almost everybody had a Sony HB-F700P. This is where I found out there were some differences between MSX a and MSX b. They were able to play way more advanced games on their computer. Having a single sided disk drive and just 128kB of RAM didn't help me. They had twice as much of both of them (plus a color screen, for which I envied them as well).
A few years later a Sony HB-F700P with a color screen was acquired, so it was time to buy an FM-PAC as well. Many people around me already abandoned MSX but a few remained. With some of them I founded Near Dark after we'd been to some Tilburg and Zandvoort fairs. In the mean time a Philips Music Module was bought as well.
In 1994 the first music disk from our hands saw the light. Every fair until Zandvoort 1997 would see a sequel to that. In the mean time we even took over the source code of the Golden Power Disk by Σmphasys, so we had a disk magazine to fill. The mentioned Zandvoort 1997 fair was such a blow that I didn't feel like going to any fair anymore. All the hassle and expenses to get there were simply not worth it.
It must have been around 2003 that this funny machine from the past tickled my fancy again. Luckily there was internet and some contacts were lain, new and old ones. So in 2004 we released a 10th anniversary celebration of our first music disk on the fair in Bussum. Having in mind the big sports halls of the nineties and then stepping into some schoolish building filled with (at tops) some forty people was a rude wake up call after the fantasies of loads of MSXnes during the trip there. There were almost as many laptops as real MSXes. Ah well, we returned there one or two times more and then it was kind of over with the fair visiting... For me at least...
Not visiting fairs doesn't mean no action at all. in 2011 Near Dark resurrected again to release a music disk in the first AND last month of that year. It must have been around that time as well that I were approached by the MSX resource Center to join their ranks and in the meanwhile I do some musical stuff to keep on enjoying the old machine and its limitations.
MEITS.NL
This site is all about the past, present and future of my activities. Things I was part of, made and am going to participate on. The past is quite well documented in the downloads page. Some more recent activity is put on Youtube. A notable selection of this is viewable in the Youtube menu and some mp3s are downloadable in the new MP3s page. Then there's DISK-online. Consider this as some sort of reincarnation of our old, dead disk magazine DISK in some sort of blog shape. Here I "spew my poison", share some "knowledge" and such kind of thing... Then there's the links page. Take a look there... If you miss your own site there, you might be added if I know about your site's existence. It won't be added if your site is in Spanish/French/Portuguese/Japanese/Korean or whatever non international friendly language. I don't support that, sorry, it's nothing personal... Just recently I added a few more options in the menu bar in which you can take a look. One item is a bit of an odd ball, since it has nothing to do with me or my MSX past. Since August 2013 I mirror the MSX Repository site formerly hosted by Marco Lazzeri as he decided to discontinue activities. I thought it'd be a pity to let all his work disappear from the internet so I volunteered to invest some space on my NAS and even add a few items there.
Meits