It has taken a long time, but finally edition 93 of MCCW is now finished: I am writing this in February 2004, about four years after the previous edition was released. The biggest part of this preface will be about the reasons for this, what happened during the silence — this seems to be partly a text about history! — and why it will be the very last issue. I apologise on beforehand if the text is a bit messy; it is composed of many little parts that I wrote during several separate days.

                             The lack of articles I mentioned in the preface of last edition was worse than we expected. But moreover, Maarten and I became very busy after releasing 92. For example, I finished my work on the university and finally got my Master’s degree in April 2001. After that I got a job at Océ and since it was already a long time ago, I lost more and more the spirit to work on MCCW.

                             I regret very much that this happened. When I got the approval of Frank H. Druijff and Wammes Witkop to start this Webmagazine, the conditions were quality and continuity. In my opinion, the quality issue has been satisfied. However, we failed the continuity issue. Of course I did not know if I could really guarantee continuity, that is why I wrote in the preface of issue 91 that we had started MCCW as an experiment. And that we would stop if there would not be enough articles to guarantee continuity.

                             Do not forget that making MCCW is an incredible amount of work! Maarten is actually the only person I could find that 1) is critical enough to be an editor 2) knows enough about MSX 3) can write good enough in English. In other words: he and I are the only ones who could edit and review the articles we received. This means that we both had to do an incredible amount of work to get the articles on an acceptable level. And we set our standards high.

                             As you probably have understood by now: we do not have a workable situation. This has led to the very long delay before we released this issue of MCCW. But it also means we cannot continue with MCCW, unfortunately enough. We just do not have the time and spirit to do all that work...

                             In last issue’s preface and even in the articles in this issue a lot of things are promised: more reviews, more episodes of series and so on... They will not be there, I am afraid. In this issue we do not even have Antti Silvast’s series continued. Antti told us shortly after the release of last issue that he lost interest in MSX, mainly because of personal reasons.

                             One of the things I promised for issue 93 was a full report of MSX Den-Yu Land 2000. This fair was held in Tokyo at the time I was doing an internship at Hitachi-Maxell, located in a village near Tokyo. Also that article will never be written, unfortunately. But I can give you a brief summary of what I remember of it here. It was actually a relatively small fair, held in just one large room. At the fair entrance I got a programme booklet, which I saw only a few weeks later in an auction on Yahoo Japan for 1000 yen! It started with a talk by Mr. Kazuhiko Nishi There were a few hundred people in the room. I hope because of the very high temperature some people fell asleep during Nishi’s talk... Anyway, he was talking about the one chip MSX and the revival, similar to the talk he held in Tilburg in 2001, I guess. The fair itself was like in Dutch fairs: many tables with people behind them selling and demonstrating stuff. I saw cool MSX T-shirts, NV-Magazine sets, music cd’s, DM System 2 books with a LaTeXed layout exactly like the MSX Technical Databook, Mr. Tsujikawa’s MSX-on-FPGA design, S.T.A.R. of Matra selling Realms of Adventure and a lot more. At the end there was also a talk of Mr. Yamashita, one of the MSX designers. When he was finished, Mr. Yokoi told us that there had been about 800 visitors that day, if I remember correctly. I had a wonderful day! And now that I am writing about this anyway, I would like to thank my Maxell-colleagues Mr. Inaba and Mr. Ido for joining me, Bernard Lamers for his excellent company, Mr. Suzukawa for his on-line translation during Mr. Yamashita’s talk and Mr. Ikeda for his good company.

                             Of course the visit to MSX Den-Yu Land was not the reason I went to Japan. As Maarten said in last issue’s preface, I did not have much time for MCCW during my internship. The working hours were practically from 8 to 9 and I only had access to the Internet at work. I also did not have any other way to communicate than mail. Maarten said he would do most of the editorial work for 93, but he never got to it.

                             So, what happened during that time and after that? I am browsing through some e-mails now to give you an impression. Collin van Ginkel proposed to start a series of articles about drawing on MSX, dubbed “Pixel Talk”... Unfortunately we have never seen an article. No offence, Collin. The deadline for number 93 was set to June 30, by myself... Oops. Bas Wijnen was planning some articles about GFX9000, but he blew up his own GFX9000 cartridge... Joynet is also something he wanted to write about, as well as several other things, like schedulers; unfortunately he seems to have never got to that. Albert Beevendorp was planning a series about assembly (Assembly Line), the first two parts were supposed to be about calculations. The unfinished first article is in this final issue. Sander Zuidema also offered to write some reviews, starting with Kyokugen and even Moonlight Saga, together with Rieks Warendorp Torringa. The Kyogugen review you can find in this final issue is the first draft he sent us. Laurens Holst was going to write a review of Compass, which was supposed to be released in Bussum 2000. However, the program was still not finished, so it was going to be a preview instead... Also, we wanted to publish interviews with well-known MSX users, finding out what happened to them and how they looked at their own MSX time. Also for this series Sander Zuidema offered to write some articles. I have a very preliminary version of the first article of ‘What has become of..’ or ‘Hoe is het nu met...’, which is about Knightram, one of the ANMA guys. It never became a full article. Lastly, I also found a draft version of a review of Sand Stone, a game of Compjoetania TNG. It is written in Dutch, by Alex Ganzeveld. He recommends the game...

                             Apart from all these plans, we also received some articles. Most authors of them clearly did not have any experience with writing articles. This means we had to communicate a lot about the articles: tell them what should be improved and getting a new version, proofread again, mailing them again with comment, etc. This is a terrible lot of work, I can tell you. Some articles needed to be half rewritten before they were publishable... We did try to compensate this by attracting a native English speaker to do some editorial work. But this never really became a success: communication was not so smooth with him and I still found quite some errors in the articles that he reviewed. Note that Frank Druijff already warned me about this in his epilogue text of MCCW 91... He was so right.

                            The few months after I got back, which is around the end of 2000 and the beginning of 2001, Maarten did a lot of work to make the XSL — the style sheet file which is used to generate HTML from the XML that is written by the authors — a lot better. I am still supposed to make some adjustments to our edit guidelines for that. After that, Maarten got really very busy, since he had to work on finishing his Master’s work, while having a job at the same time...

                             After one year had passed since issue 92, on July 30 2001 9:04, I sent an e-mail to our private mailing list... Here is the contents:
Hi there MCCW people,

I’m sensing a problem. We haven’t published since one year now...

What’s the cause of this?
1) We don’t have people that have time for editorial work (reading incoming articles, giving comment on them, improving the language and style). Especially Maarten used to do this and I also did a part of it (but Maarten is far better at it!). However, it’s not the reason why Maarten joined MCCW, so he got ‘tired’ of it.
2) As the editor in chief, I have a problem since I am not at the university anymore, where I could process MCCW. This will be fixed as soon as I have a pc at home. I’m planning to have one in a couple of weeks. But it means I have far less time to work on MCCW
3) We don’t get enough articles. This could be caused by the fact that we don’t have so many releases... But still, it’s good to have some sort of stock of articles, and at the moment we hardly have anything like that.
4) If this all means we have to quit (which would be a terrible pity), I at least want to publish the (almost) finished articles. About the Maiskoek/Bits and Pieces: lots of those messages are obsolete. I will at least make a note in the preface and in the Maiskoek/B&P itself about this.

So, what do we need? We need editorial staff!
A good editor (like Maarten) has the following ‘properties’:
- is extremely critical (to get a high standard) about style and language (and content) therefore having a lot of knowledge about language (mainly English), how to write an article and about MSX in general
- is well reachable (as editor-in-chief I need good communication with the other editor(s)...)
- has (some) time to do things! (I understand it’s a hobby-thing though...)
- and of course some motivation is necessary.

I think Maarten still has time for the technical support regarding the production of MCCW. Please confirm, Maarten.
Also, Maarten has the tooling to produce MCCW at the moment, in case this would be necessary (i.e. when I don’t have my pc yet).

Please share your thoughts about this with me.
This summarises my feelings quite well. And nothing changed after I sent this mail, except that I got my pc at the end of 2001 and made the tools work on it — in March 2002 — so that I could at least generate the MCCW on it. That is all...

                             Another interesting thing is that we got about a dozen mails of people that just wanted to sell their MSX or wanted to tell us how great they think MSX is. For the former category, we mostly proposed to make an I/O text about them for the Bits and Pieces page...

                             Luckily, there is still a web site on which one can publish articles: The MSX Resource Center. This site has become the biggest MSX Community site in the world; at least in the non-Japanese world. Please take a look there and send articles to them if you still have some laying around.

                             So, this is the very final issue of MCCW. All good things come to an end. To be honest, this issue is not of the quality we are trying to make. But, we felt that the articles that we have received that are sort of publishable should be published. We did not want the work of the authors to be done for nothing. However, since we do not have so much time these days, we just made sure that the articles had a minimum quality level, just enough to publish them. Some articles clearly were not — completely — finished yet. Sometimes I put a note with some explanation under those articles, for clarity. The bright side is: there are more articles than ever in one issue! Have fun with it.

                             Okay, the last thing to say here: thanks to everyone who made MCCW possible!