Indeed, there's no composition involved. Wrong word on my part!

I mean, I don't have a lot of faith that even if they did support AdLib/Soundblaster or what-not, they'd actually have put the time into composing the tracks well. ;)

I feel like those either have to be the developers' names, or the names of their friends/relatives/pets. They seem too specific to just be random.

There was an Apple //gs version of Ys I?! I don't think I even knew that!

If there were ever a version of Ys where it’d be appropriate to rename Dogi to Colin, I think it’d be this one. That looks like a Colin to me. ;)

Actually, it looks like she doesn't have links to her channels on her Bluesky profile, so... YouTube here: www.youtube.com/@JorunnaV

And Twitch here (but Twitch sucks; use YouTube! It also sucks, but it sucks LESS! Heheh): www.twitch.tv/jorunnav

The third Pumpkin Adventure game has actually become my favorite indie game on the entire MSX platform, and one of my favorite 8-bit RPGs of all time -- and while the first game can't come anywhere close to that, you can absolutely see the bones of what this legendary homebrew series would become.

For context, MCCM is a Dutch MSX magazine that primarily ran through the '90s, and Pumpkin Adventure I is the first game in a trilogy of stupidly silly (but rather good!) adventure/RPGs independently developed by a bunch of edgy Dutch teens at the time, vaguely Halloween themed. So it's a good fit!

Damn, that's cool! I had not seen that before.

Well, thank you for reminding me of bygone days! What a wild time that was...

Crazy to think back on those days -- that feels like several lifetimes ago at this point!

OK! That makes more sense. Heheh.

I wonder if we had any interactions back then! I never finished any games in VERGE (like most people, sadly!), but I certainly did make a lot of demos, and I even modified the open-source code for VERGE 1 to release "VERGE V1+," with text string and file support.

Wait, you used VERGE for that?! Holy crap! I used to love VERGE! Made a ton of demos and such in it!

Aaaand, it's been found! It seems it HAS been dumped before, it just wasn't in any of the usual suspect spots and my Google-fu wasn't strong enough. Big thanks to the MSX Discord community for tracking it down -- and even re-cracking it for the hell of it, apparently! ;)

There's lots of absolute gold on these disks, though, including these SD depictions of life as a T&E Soft programmer, so I hope someone is able to crack these first 3 disks for preservation's sake -- and hey, the fourth one plays fine! Grab the full set here: drive.google.com/file/d/1q40y...

Anyway, these disks are rad, and at least one of the four dumped without issue, containing Psy-O-Blade Nagoya Version (a goofy Psy-O-Blade spinoff written entirely with thick Nagoya dialect), a rock/paper/scissors-themed Space Invaders clone, and digitized photos of T&E Soft staffers from the era!

I'm guessing the rips I made are fine (though they may not be?), but the copy-protection is checking for physical errors on the disks, which may not be emulatable. So the only way to load the first 3 of these 4 disks from rips might just be by cracking them, theoretically. But LMK what you think!

When ripping, I had to use MSX Floppy Disk Manager's "emulation error" feature, which ignores bad sectors and just keeps ripping, because both disks of SP1 had two consecutive bad sectors right at the end, while Disk A of SP2 had two right at the beginning (and SP2 Disk B has no copy protection!).