Happy 2008!

Welcome to the year 2008, MSX fans! And a very special year it will be, as on June 27th the MSX computer system will celebrate its 25th anniversary. We at MRC plan to celebrate this quarter-century of MSX'ing with all you MSX fans out there - for instance with our multidisciplinary MSX development contest we like to call the MEGA Challenge with which you can win one of three One Chip MSX computers.

January 1st would not be January 1st without MRC's annual overview of MSX news highlights, MRC milestones and statistics of the year past. And what a year it was! The year started with the grand finale of MSXdev'06 in which 19 brand new MSX1 games were released. Our active MSX forum broke through the 75,000 posts barrier and is now rapidly heading towards 100,000. With MSX-UNI a new MSX2+ compatible board was announced in Brazil and in the Netherlands an MP3 cartridge for MSX was released. The SD/MMC interface for MSX followed shortly afterwards. A new MSX1 demo called Utopia amazed us all and, sadly, the Western edition of the One Chip MSX was postponed until further notice - although we do expect a news update on that in the near future. Another interesting MSX hardware project, DUMAS was unfortunately delayed as well, but the release of SymbOS 2.0 managed to turn our frowns upside down. MRC reached the 5 million visits milestone and Meisei entered the arena of MSX emulators. MRC guru Bart Schouten parted from the MSX Resource center crew and the board of the MRC foundation and the highly anticipated game Manbow 2 was finally released (check here for a review). MSX Resource center 2k2 celebrated its 5th anniversary and the year ended with the release of 11 new MSX1 game releases as the MSXdev'07 competition came to an end.

Due to various circumstances, MRC went through quite a rough patch during the second and third quarter of the year - resulting in less news posts and activity on the MSX forum than usual. Despite that, our Motigo webstats counter - that has been counting visits to our website since 1996 - registered more visits to our website than ever before in a single year! As usual, we end the happy new years post with the year in numbers. Here are some statistics of the activity on our website during 2007 compared to the activity of 2006:

• Visitors: 1,297,104 (1,074,865)
• News posts: 499 (604)
• Forum posts: 16,803 (17,047)
• Reactions: 3.088 (4,692)

The values mentioned in parentheses are the statistics of 2006. In 2007, a grand total of 589 different people - just one less than our record of last year - contributed to the contents of the MSX Resource Center by submitting one or more articles, news posts, forum posts or reactions to news posts. Just like previous years, the most active members of the MSX Resource Center deserve some extra attention as a token of our appreciation. In 2007, the following 10 MRC members were the most active, based on a score of 6 points per news post, 2 per forumpost and 1 per reaction, doubling the score on 'first posts':

1. manuel (2722)
2. dvik (1270)
3. Prodatron (1175)
4. ARTRAG (1037)
5. PingPong (830)
6. jltursan (807)
7. nikodr (801)
8. NYYRIKKI (799)
9. ro (713)
10. DemonSeed (632)

Prolonging his status as most active MRC member of the year, manuel will yet again receive a small present from the MRC as a token of our appreciation: an official MSX T-Shirt or.... perhaps another piece of MSX merchandize. But more about that later. Our thanks go out to him all the others who contributed to the MRC. Next year we will also reward a prize to the most active member at the MRC. We hope you will keep visiting and enriching the contents of our website for a long time to come!

We would also like to thank 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 MRC crew would like to wish you a happy, healthy, prosperous 2008 and we're all looking forward to celebrate the 25th anniversary of our beloved MSX computer system in style. To a year loaded with MSX action!