Happy 2005!

On January 1st, 2003 we started a tradition in which we combined our best wishes for the new year with some statistics on the usage of our MSX portal. 2004 as been an amazing year for the MSX Community. It has been a very long time since so many new software titles were released for MSX in one single year. Competitions like the MRC Challenges (Snowfall, Under Water, Bounce, Bombaman and MuSiXmas) and MSXdev'04 contributed to this activity, and we expect other MRC Challenges, MSXdev'05 and Ilac'05 will continue doing the same in 2005.

But the increased activity of the MSX Community did not only show in the outcome of these competitions. Bombaman, Vscreen, Internestor Lite, MBwave 1.16, Meridian 3.0 beta3 and Bomb Jack for MSX2 are only a few examples of great games and utilities that were released throughout the year. Interesting hardware developments like eMSX2++ and Obsonet (Ethernet for MSX) clearly demonstrate MSX is alive and kicking on all fronts. The MSX Revival continued steadily with the release of the MSX Game Reader, the announcement and preview of the One Chip MSX1 and the first steps of the MSX Revival outside of Japan: Bazix announcing WOOMB.

On the MSX Resource Center things were more active than ever. As was the case with preceding years, never before did we have so many newsposts, reactions, forum posts or visitors. With our Nedstat counter reporting a staggering 1,054,722 visitors in 2004 there were even more visitors than all preceding years altogether. Ads from Google and eBay were introduced to slightly make up for our increasing hosting costs, while recently our members were given the option to turn these ads off again. With the introduction of the Portuguese MSX Resource Center the MRC is now available in 4 different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch). We still really would like to offer our website in Japanese as well, but we need the help of native Japanese MSX fans who can (and want to) translate our news from English to Japanese in a regular basis. If you can contribute to this, or know someone who can, please let us know you want to join our team.

Lets have a look at the MRC stats of 2004:

• Visitors: 1,054,722 (681,322)
• Newsposts: 851 (794)
• Forum posts: 24,034 (12,611)
• Reactions: 4,564 (2,006)

The values mentioned in parentheses are the statistics of 2003. For more stats you can have a look at the Downloads top 10 posted earlier today. In 2004, a grand total of 551 people contributed to the contents of the MSX Resource Center by submitting one or more articles, news posts, forum posts or reactions to news posts. That are almost 200 more than the amount of people that did the same in 2003. As usual we bring you a top list of the most active users. In 2004, the following 10 MRC members were the most active, based on a score of 8 points per article, 4 per newspost, 2 per forumpost and 1 per reaction:

1. GuyveR800 (3600 points)
2. BiFi (3169 points)
3. wolf_ (2634 points)
4. flyguille (1439 points)
5. Grauw (1280 points)
6. ro (1272 points)
7. dhau (1198 points)
8. IC (1086 points)
9. pitpan (871 points)
10. mars2000you (854 points)

Of course, MRC team members were excluded from this top 10.

The time has come to thank everybody who ever visited the MRC, especially everybody who joined the MRC and contributed to its contents, all the active MSX developers who keep bringing us new and surprising hardware, software, websites and magazines. Last, but certainly not least, we would like to thank all the people who have sent us a donation by bank or Paypal this year. As the MRC is growing and growing, so are the costs to keep the site online and in movement. Even with small donations, you helped (and are helping) to keep our site online. Respect.

The entire MSX Resource Center team wishes you all the best for 2005!