Caring for a MSX
What ages inside. What you can do. Where to call in a specialist.
The MSX was not one machine but a standard, and the faults follow the maker rather than the badge. Almost all of them are the same story: forty-year-old rubber, and forty-year-old capacitors.
What actually goes wrong
Leaking capacitors
What you see: No picture, no sound, or tapes that will not load.
Why: The electrolytic capacitors leak with age. Sony machines built on the HIC-1 board (HB-F1II, HB-XD, HB-XDmkII, HB-XDJ, HB-XV) and Panasonic's FS-A1mkII and FS-A1F are the ones this is most often reported on.
The keyboard stops answering
What you see: Keys that do nothing, or whole rows of them.
Why: The flexible ribbon inside the keyboard degrades. It is a known fault on Sony's HB-XD, HB-XDJ and HB-XV, common enough that replacement kits are sold for it.
The floppy drive belt perishes
What you see: The drive spins weakly, or not at all, and disks will not read.
Why: A rubber belt drives the mechanism, and rubber does not last forty years. Reported on the MSX2+ FS-A1FX, FS-A1WX and FS-A1WSX, and on the turboR A1ST and A1GT.
What ages, what you can do, where to stop
What ages
- The electrolytic capacitors — the picture, the sound and the tape drive all depend on them.
- The keyboard's flexible ribbon, on the Sony HB-XD family in particular.
- The rubber belt in the floppy drive.
- The save battery inside any cartridge that has one.
What you can do
- Replace a perished floppy belt. It is a rubber band, and it is sold as a part.
- Fit a keyboard ribbon repair kit — patience, not soldering.
- Store it dry and cool, and keep tapes and floppies away from heat.
Where specialist work begins
- Recapping the board. Soldering, on decades-old traces.
- Anything where a leaked capacitor has already damaged what is underneath it.
Honest answers
I am not in Japan. Does a Japanese MSX have a Japanese keyboard?
Yes — a Japanese MSX carries a dedicated kana key and a Japanese key layout, where a European machine (a Philips VG-8020, say) carries an international QWERTY arrangement instead. The difference is not only cosmetic. Software that reads the key matrix directly, rather than going through BASIC, is written against one region's wiring, and the same keypress can land somewhere unexpected on a machine from the other. For most cartridge games this never comes up. If you plan to type on it, it matters.
What breaks on an MSX?
Three things, all of them the passage of time rather than any fault of the design. The electrolytic capacitors leak, taking the picture, the sound, or the tape drive with them — most often reported on Sony's HB-F1II, HB-XD, HB-XDmkII, HB-XDJ and HB-XV, and on Panasonic's FS-A1mkII and FS-A1F. The keyboard's flexible ribbon degrades until keys stop answering, a known fault on the Sony HB-XD family. And where there is a floppy drive, the rubber belt inside it has perished — the MSX2+ FS-A1FX, FS-A1WX and FS-A1WSX, and the turboR A1ST and A1GT.
Can I fix those myself?
The floppy belt is the friendly one: it is a rubber band, and replacements are sold. The keyboard ribbon has repair kits made for it, and needs patience rather than an iron. Recapping is the hard one — that is soldering, on a board that is decades old, and it is where the home bench ends. Buy on condition where you can.
Which format should I plan to play on — cartridge, tape, or disk?
Cartridges have survived best; they are the most physically robust of the three. The one caveat is that a cartridge with a save battery inside it has a battery that is now decades old. Tapes and floppies should both be treated as perishable — the disks because of the drive belt, the tapes because they are tape.
Which generation should I look for?
We are not going to pretend to more than we know. MSX2+ (1988) and MSX turboR (1990) stayed in Japan, and the turboR flagship, Panasonic's FS-A1GT, launched at 99,800 yen and did not sell well. What we could not find was any reliable comparison of what the generations are actually like to live with as a second-hand buyer — so we are not going to invent one for you.