Hello everyone! I was recently going through the MSX2, 2+ and TR games library and a question formed in my mind:
There are many more games in Screen 7 than anyone would expect and hardly any Screen 8 games. Why is that so? I started considering the various possible reasons but it still baffles me.
This is what I came up with and I would like to hear your opinions on the matter:
We all know that Screen5 is the king of MSX2 since you get 4 pages (1 active plus 3 more) of 16 color graphics from a Color Look Up Table (CLUT). This way you can have 2 pages to swap plus 2 more pages to fill up with graphics data. This way even 64kb MSX2 machines could make full use of the available memory. Cool!
Now, Screen 7 is the same as screen 5 but you sacrifice 2 pages for double the horizontal resolution. Now you get 1 active and one extra page. However swapping pages is now a problem as you won't have anywhere to store the graphics data (standard ram excluded). What you are left with is not using page swapping and live-updating the active page with graphics data that is stored on the second page. This is not an ideal way to draw your game graphics but it can be done with certain restrictions. Sprites are drawn with half the resolution and they use the same CLUT as the rest of the Screen. Fading in is possible since a CLUT is used so drawing a screen with all colors set to black and then fading in can be a helpful trick.
Then we move to Screen 8. Now you get the standard resolution, 256 non CLUT colors and, just like Screen 7, 2 pages. You get 16 color hardware sprites that are locked in the standard MSX1 palette.
Now, from a certain point in time you could see that Screen 7 became the prevalent screen mode in MSX2,+,R games. However with the 2 page restriction you would expect that many would opt for more colors rather than double the resolution (considering the lame video quality of the CRT TVs).
Here are some reasons for the Japanese developers opting for Screen 7 that I could think of:
1) As the MSX started to show it's age, action gamers left the platform. The latest games are not action oriented but rather strategy, RPG and adventure type games that heavily feature Kanji characters. This would be a very good reason to opt for the higher resolution.
2) As the MSX standard stopped being the market leader that it once was (in the low price point segment of Japan) games started being cross-developed or ported from the PC-88 line of computers. This is really obvious as there are numerous games that use Screen 7 with a horrible static pallet. Case in point, Snatcher on MSX2 uses 100% PC-88 artwork.
3) The latest games heavily feature manga style artwork. Since this style uses few colors and black outlines, it makes sense that it would be better represented in a higher resolution rather than a with more colors.
As a point against Screen 8 I would add the static pallet of the sprites that would severely limit hardware sprite use and more or less force developers to use "software" sprites.
Another point against Screen 8 is the inability to do Fade-ins, Fade-outs and color circling. But this is hardly a deal-breaker in my opinion.
However, 256 colors at once, used in such a straightforward way was a HUGE differentiator of the V9938, back in the day, and one would expect that it would be used far more than it did.
In Europe there were "Goody" and "Dr Livingstone" from Opera soft as well as "Breaker" that proved the viability of Screen 8 games, but the Japanese did not agree (apart from Ikari, early on and a few RPG from little known companies).
As new games appear on MSX with the resurgence of retro-developing I would really hope to see new developers taking advantage of screen 8 and restoring it to it's rightful position in history, as a graphics mode that was 10 years before it's time!
). 
