It’s been thirty years since Microsoft and ASCII jointly introduced the MSX standard to the world. Although mostly successful in Japan, some European manufacturers adhered to the standard as well, the best known of them all being Philips. Their VG-8020 MSX was a popular computer in the mid-eighties european market. It was marketed to schools everywhere as a powerful learning tool, and that’s how my school bought a dozen of them, along with a standard setup of Philips green phosphor monitors and tape recorders. Learning Basic programming language on those machines was my very first computing experience.
I have been intermittently working on this project for some months. It’s been an exercise in patience, mostly because I obsessed myself with reproducing all items in it as faithfully as possible. That might seem pointless, since many of those details can’t be appreciated in this scene, but I wanted my assets to be reusable for a future project.
Every single object was modeled with Blender. All renders in this thread have been created with Cycles.
Funny thing about this is that I never got to actually own any MSX (everything here was modeled using just reference pictures from around the web). I only got to work with the ones we had at school, but I do have very fond memories of these machines. They were remarkable devices when compared to other 8-bit home computers of their generation such as the Spectrum or the Amstrad CPC.
I always envied one of my neighbours for having a Commodore Amiga 500, a powerful and wonderful machine, and so much ahead of its time. A true multimedia machine even before the multimedia concept existed. Even after DOS machines became common household computers I kept thinking I was missing out on something amazing for not owning an Amiga. Ah, the memories…
LOL! Begging for an Amiga 500 and getting an Amstrad CPC with a green monitor instead. I feel your pain… I got a nameless IBM PC clone. More powerful and versatile, but a real pain for the eyes with its CGA colors. At least the CPC had an attractive color palette, even if the chunky sprites looked like the grand daddies of Minecraft.
Actually, the Amiga 500 was the low budget version of the Amiga line up, tuned down to make it affordable for a wider market. It was released along the Amiga 2000, the high end version wich targeted professional users. Being a lot cheaper than its high-end brothers is what made the Amiga 500 so popular in Europe. That, and being visually and audibly stunnig for the time.
Thank you. Since this is a still render, I’m not sure what you mean by “flickering”. I’m guessing you might be referring to the moire pattern in the screen, since someone else asked about that already in deviantART. The pattern is caused by the screen texture and the slight surface curvature. The texture was generated by grabbing a screenshot of OpenMSX emulator running the original VG-8020 bios.
my bad I had Andromeda Galaxy as wallpaper, but she is a big hot chick too anyway.
Yeah no rush, add to the list, do it when you feel like it. My new wallpaper is your render
You know I just had this idea of an Amiga 500 hooked up to futuristic gear like the pumped up Delorean in Back To The Future, like a space ship of some sort.
Though the tape-recorder has parts missing it still works 
Since this is a still render, I’m not sure what you mean by “flickering”. I’m guessing you might be referring to the moire pattern in the screen, since someone else asked about that already in deviantART. The pattern is caused by the screen texture and the slight surface curvature. The texture was generated by grabbing a screenshot of OpenMSX emulator running the original VG-8020 bios.