Happy 2006!

Welcome to 2006, MSX fans! Traditionally, we start the year with an overview of the year past. And a year packed with MSX action it was. To name just a few of the many ups and downs, we saw the release of an MSX demo coded by an anonymous coder, an era of MSX fairs in Tilburg came to an end, David Heremans released an amazing realtime texturemapped 3D demo, the first Obsonet cartridges were released, ASCII released another edition of MSX Magazine, Bazix announced a mobile phone version of MSXPLAYer was in development, the One Chip MSX became available on pre-order, we reported on MSX World 2005, the largest MSX event held in years, Infinite released the impressive 4motion demo engine, all over the world, people wearing MSX T-Shirts started to appear, the One Chip MSX did not make it to production, yet was demonstrated on the Tokyo Gameshow, Sunrise started selling and producing MSX Game Readers, Kralizec released the platform game Dahku, the One Chip MSX was given a second chance, Project Dumas and a new MSX soundchip were announced and the MSXdev'05 competition alone caused for the development of a huge amount of new MSX1 games. And this are just a few of the many things the MSX Resource Center reported about this year.

As for MSX Resource Center, we broke the 2,500 newsposts barrier, we switched to a dedicated webserver, received our 50,000th post in our MSX forum, our website was launched in Russian, broke the 3 million visitors barrier and -unfortunately- suffered from more downtime than in any previous year. Luckily, the press release stating IGN had acquired MSX Resource Center turned out to be an April fools joke.

As usual, we end the happy new years post with the year in numbers. Here are some statistics of the activity on our website durring 2005 compared to the activity of 2004:

• Visitors: 1,022,580 (1,053,722)
• Newsposts: 879 (851))
• Forum posts: 19,456 (24,034)
• Reactions: 6,002 (4,564)

The values mentioned in parentheses are the statistics of 2004. In 2005, a grand total of 542 different 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. For the first time in the history of MSX Resource Center, we did not have growth on all fronts, but we are very pleased to have consolidated the tremendous activity on our website.

Just like previous years, the most active members of the MSX Resource Center deserve some extra attention as a token of our appreciation. In 2005, 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. BiFi (2176)
2. wolf_ (1999)
3. manuel (1172)
4. mars2000you (1149)
5. ro (1142)
6. poke-1,170 (1044)
7. norakomi (1002)
8. POISONIC (971)
9. AuroraMSX (837)
10. pitpan (831)

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 staff would like to wish you a very happy new year with lots and lots of MSX action. Happy 2006!