*** M E M O R U M ***

I've been having a chat with Dave about the best things about the MTX. The game selection probably isn't the prime reason for picking up an MTX these days, that would be the hardware, but what would the top 5 games (or top 10 maybe) games be.

I had a think of the games I played a lot and made the most of the MTX hardware and came up with in no particular order:
Chamberoids
Highway Encounter
Downstream Danger
Sepulcri Scelerati
Surface Scanner

It's probably no surprise those are all later games and there's one convertion from elsewhere.
Chamberoids, because there wall always the thought that just maybe it could be done faster.
Highway encounter becase of both the looks and the fact it could be finished in a reasonable time.
Downstream Danger and Sepulcri were so damn hard, because they both needed pinpoint accuracy, but had the just one more go appeal.
Surface scanner had the one more go/get a better score appeal too.

Honourable mentions to Kilopede and Hawkwars amongst the earlier games for getting a lot of playing time while not being overly advanced.

Son of Pete got plenty of play time too, but my version was hacked for 99 lives, that made it much more playable that the un-patched version

The only game I can remember playing any significant amount is Toado.

The other games I have copies of are:

• Draughts - I don't remember ever actually playing this.
• Chess - I think this completely trounced me the first time I played it, and I probably never went back.
• Snowball (Level 9 text adventure game) - I converted this from the tape version to run from disc, but I never finished the game.

I actually have little memory of what I did with the MTX before I got SDX + CP/M.

Edit: The one other commercial MTX tape I have is EdAsm (a Z80 assembler and editor).

On the subject of what is best about the MTX I would say:

• The very complete hardware documentation.
• The CTC chip - enabling timing with 4us resolution.

My main use of my MTX over the years has been to support my electronics hobby:

• Using a custom paint style program to draw PCB layouts for home etching.
• Using the CTC and printer port to program chips or decode digital signals.

I only had a very small selection of MTX games, the ones that I got with my MTX512, which was definitely Toado and possibly draughts.

I bought a couple more tapes, Snowball, like Bill, but unlike Bill, I never got it to run from disk and Andy's 3D Tachyon Fighter, which I was hopeless at. I bought a disk from Genpat with 5 (likely pirated) games on it, but can't remember which ones they were.

Best things about the MTX for me?
That cool metal case and keyboard build quality
The I/O possibilities
And later, once I'd saved up enough, the FDX allowing me to run CP/M like I had at work

It's a shame that some of the games that we have now were not available back then, if the machine had been more popular, then we might have gotten more conversions like Claus's. The proverbial "chicken and egg" scenario though, poor sales leading to poor software support from third parties.

The problem getting more games made at the time for the MTX was simply a matter of maths really. It was clear that even with 20,000+ MTX's sold the number of game sales was if you were lucky in the 100s. I think most people brought the MTX to learn stuff on rather than play games on. While I was selling (Megastar) games our sales were in the low 100s even for the best of the games which showed what the MTX was capable of doing. When I was at Memotech one of my tasks was to call up software houses and ask them to do MTX versions, they pretty much all replied it was not worth it. Level9 were very disappointed with their MTX sales. Add teenage piracy and it really was not worth making games for the MTX financially sadly.

As for my top 5 games, which might be a bit biased and in no specific order..

Zarkos
Son Of Pete
Kilopede
Qogo2
SMG

I did enjoy plenty of others but as it says top 5 I thought I had better stop there..