&gt; I never came across any MSX machines when I was a kid and collecting weird computers. Did they ever make it across the pond to the US market?<p>No, they didn&#x27;t. Despite being a Microsoft standard. They were big in Europe, Japan and Brazil.<p>The MSX were wonderful machines. The even had &quot;plug and play&quot; hardware – cartridges were designed for software, but they could have basically anything. Companies created disk drive interface, hard drive, lightpen, you name it. And they would all setup automatically, due to the included ROM.<p>Also had great audio and video capabilities for the time. Eg. from 1989 (during the IBM PS&#x2F;2 era, with VGA and the pc speaker for sound) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gcZJ64PgtgA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gcZJ64PgtgA</a> That&#x27;s for MSX2(which still used the Z-80). An example for the original MSX in 1986: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sk5C2E90dGY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sk5C2E90dGY</a><p>It is amazing what a &lt;4 Mhz processor can do. It did have a GPU, which helped due to the sprites (see the zanac example above). However, much later, people discovered that the GPU was actually a bottleneck and the CPU would have been able to push pixels (patterns, actually) at a much faster rate if it had access to the video memory directly.