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Link original en The MSX Games bOX28-Mayo-2001
The MSX Games Box: Can you tell us about your position at Konami and what your involvments were with them?
'I was very lucky to work for Konami in R&D. I stayed for about 10 months in their MSX division based in Sacramento, CA. It happened by chance after a number of events that finally were very favourable to me. I tell you here my story ... in 1985 during my fourth year in high-school (14 years old) my Maths teacher initiates me to computing and asks to analyse a spreadsheet program with cross-tables containing data on teachers, their availability etc... the program intent was supposed to determine the class schedule of each teacher. Unfortunately it assigned wrongly two classes to a same teacher at the same hour- and I was asked to look for the bug ... and was promised an 'old' MSX Philips VG-5000 if I succeeded to fix the problem - which I did!
With my new MSX in hand I started to buy software from two shops in Paris (one of them was Maubert Electronic, the other I can't recall but was near the Gare de Lyon) and got subscribed to MSX News ... I played a lot with this machine and started to develop mini-games and small programs in Basic and Z80 machine code. At the same time (mid-1987) I was also beta-tester for Konami MSX games (the father of an American friend was at the head of the Research department at Konami in South California).
In 1987, I join for a training Konami to beta-test MSX2 games and give my first opinions on S.C.C. cartridges. Later I am proposed to mount a Research Team to counter piracy and crackers coming from Spain, France and Belgium. My goal: crack software with French friends to be able to provide better safety against crackers ... this finished in a curious situation where Konami paid us if we succeeded to crack the games their security programmers developed - so that they could eventually do better than us!
A big drawback of the MSX standard was that you needed whatever the machine you were using to ensure all software was compatible with former versions and with all MSX computers (this explains the existence of the 'hooks' table – which I will explain later)
All this enabled me to work on the S.C.C. project later on. After one year of 'counter-cracking', Konami sales were gearing up et piracy was decreasing at the times games like Nemesis 2, Salamander, King's Valley 2, Nemesis 3, F1 Spirit were about to come out.
I then worked six years in collaboration with Konami. First from 1988 to 1992, back in France, I co-ordinated the follow-up of Konami's researches in piracy issues and to work on the S.C.C. – I then came back in 1993 to the US for 10 months to give a little help for the 'Disk Packs' series after that I can't tell you more since I signed a special confidentiality agreement with Microsoft. Nowadays I work for a multinational, still dealing with piracy issues.
Time has gone fast since 1989 when I conceived programs to transfer data to a central server to analyse the number of coins (1 French Franc, 2FF, 5FF and 10FF) used in arcades – in which there were many Konami games. What do you think was used in those arcades to count the coins and establish accounting documents, know if the game was successful or even know when to empty the cash?
Well a MSX!!!
I developed the concept and I am still gaining a percentage each time somebody puts a coin in one of these machines (even on parking metres!).
Mars Up-One: Has the S.C.C microchip been developed to better sound quality (compared to PSG) or to fight against piracy of software cartridges?
It was developed to better the sound quality compared to PSG. By the way, you just have to have one single S.C.C. cartridge to be able to get the same sound quality on all cracked games. A S.C.C. cartridge with a switch button connected to the boot connectors of the cartridge is sufficient another way of doing it is to power-up your MSX and insert firmly your S.C.C. cartridge at the prompt.
But I won't go further on how to restitute the S.C.C. sound you just have to look how the table of hooks is conceived – a copy of it can be found in RAM – to know that you can 'address' yourself to the S.C.C. microchip and ask him to read music at a precise location in the RAM, instead of the ROM of the cartridge
The table of Hooks: it is addressing range placed at the same location in each MSX, whatever its generation, and which contains an instruction to jump to a precise location of the RAM (or the ROM). When a MSX boots up with a cartridge, the hooks table is filled up with the boot program of the cartridge.
In the case of a S.C.C. cartridge, a part of the hooks table – reserved for routing sounds to PSG – is replaced by instructions to redirect the sounds to the S.C.C. microchip located in one of the cartridge ports. A simple "POKE & Hxxxx,y" redirects the instructions.
When my friends and myself told this fact to the Head of R&D of Konami following our "beta-tests", we got hired on the spot!
Mars Up-One: If I am not wrong, the S.C.C. chip is not only a sound processor but also a memory mapper which handles the 16Kb blocs of the game ... what are the interactions with the memory mapper used on high-end MSX2 machines?
I can't tell anything about this, I signed a confidentiality agreement with Konami and Microsoft. Your question is however good.
The MSX Games Box: What were the main problems with making the S.C.C.? Did Konami have projects other than MSX in mind?
SONY Corp. was a major obstacle in the large-scale development of the S.C.C.: too much competition and too much danger to work on a project that was staying on sand (crackers made too much damage to the MSX standard: in Europe, cracked games arrived 6 months before the official cartridges – this killed the MSX standard in France).
And the MSX2+ was in the wait for too long, people already talked about the 'Arlésienne': the MSX3. For most adepts of the MSX in France, the change in name of the only magazine from "MSX News" to "Micro News" confirmed the death of the MSX standard. This was followed by the closing of the shop in rue de Charenton.
The MSX Games Box: Can you talk us about Konami's strategy for the MSX in 1988? Did they already consider the MSX as an ageing computer?
By publishing "Techniques de programmation des jeux en Assembleurs" for the MSX standard, the editor of the book showed all young people how to intercept the vectors in the table of hooks so they could develop their own programs and crack the others.
In 1988, Konami asked a young team of programmers to create games and demos on 3.5" floppy disks that used the S.C.C. sound chip this gave birth to the 'Disk Station' and 'Disk Pack' series. But this only lasted for a while, until FM-PAC came out. I still have some of these games and demos .. which circulated under the jacket and the mailing costs were subsidised by Konami.
In fact I did not see any MSX games since Shalom.
From 1993, Konami placed us on new projects and I came back to France to follow all this up from far. I received from time to time one or two cartridges coming from Japan as well as the already-cracked games from Spain. I continued to crack them so I did not lose the hand on it and sent them to Sacramento to say it was not worthwhile anymore to send cartridges to test and that pirated copies were already there Konami then moved out of the MSX scene in Europe.
Mars Up-One: On the sound level, can the S.C.C. soundchip be considered as a first step towards the more elaborated FM-PAC cartridge?
Certainly by the way there has been "copying in the air "
Mars Up-One: In the same idea, the SCC+ seems to be the ultimate accomplishment of Konami's researches on sound? Can we also say that Konami always wanted to go on its own compared to Panasonic who preferred to develop the FM-PAC?
Konami proposed collaboration with Panasonic but there were too many problems with hardware developers. Sony Corp, who was strongly working on its audio activities (some of its components equip the FM-PAC) did interfere to stop this collaboration since the S.C.C. worked against them.
Mars Up-One: I have maybe a strange question contrarily to FM-PAC which was commercialised on an independent cartridge, why weren't the S.C.C. and S.C.C.+ chips commercialised separately – separately from the games themselves?
On one side, Konami's vision has always been to propose to its fans games and not hardware. On the other side the project would have come into conflict with the FM-PAC supporters, Sony Corp. being one of them. However Konami made a market research and found out they did not have the necessary resources to make this project cost-effective, it was way too much risky to invest in it at a time where the MSX was already having difficulties to fight against competition.
The MSX Games Box: Do you think there is any particular reason why the MSX was never sold in the USA?
The Amiga 500 and Atari 520 ST, closely followed by the Amiga 1000 and Atari 1040 ST, were already present on the US market. Let's not forget that those were slightly more expensive than the MSX, thus provided better margins to the distributors. In fact, it was just for a question of money that the standard sunk in Europe and was never sold in the States, and even more important as I said before, piracy was way too easy. It's really sad.
Mars Up-One: Have the relations between Konami, ASCII and Panasonic always been excellent?
There was a time when Panasonic hunted for gold the developers of the S.C.C. chip. I have been contacted by them but was home sick and wanted to return to France.
Regarding ASCII, this company has always been great, this with Konami but also with the manufacturers of MSX systems (except maybe Philips, which was a bit too European in their view, thus less considered).
The MSX Games Box: What do you think of the possible comeback of the MSX presented by ASCII last April?
I can only refer myself to what I said about the death of the MSX standard. I am surprised to know it could live again and I must say I did not hear of the Turbo-R before and from the early nineties, the only beta-tests Konami sent me were for gaming consoles and PCs I did have the chance to test Metal Gear Solid for Playstation and PC and was disgusted to know cracked version were already in France before its official release.
By the way, why do you say possible comeback? If the MSX standard is dead, leave it there in its tomb! But I understand it could be a good compromise for those who hesitate between buying a PC and a console
The MSX Games Box: Could Konami be interested in this new project?
Well they have already put their new suits on and contacted their old teams from 10 years ago they contacted me to be their consultant in France.
