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[MSXdev03] Let's Quickly Play Dioniso's Penguin Race (2003)

287 views · Published 12 July 2011 · 12:39 · Indexed 24 October 2026

Channel: FiXato · 2011 · Gaming

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Let's Quickly Play Alfonso D.C. Dioniso's "Penguin Race", a MSX game competing in the MSXdev03 programming contest.
MSXdev is a great initiative that originally had the goal to "celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the creation of the MSX standard".
At the time MSX2 was dominant in the scene, as most games that were still being developed, focused on MSX2.
The MSXdev competitions eventually ended up being so successful for the MSX(1) popularity, that nowadays the majority of games for our beloved homecomputer system seem to be for MSX instead of MSX2.

The first MSXdev competition in 2003 however had only 3 entries, of which 1 was a beta release and ended up being cancelled. The entries, Karoshi Corporation's version of Guru Logic, CEZ GS's Teki Paki beta, and Dioniso's Penguin Race were still released though through MSXdev. Sadly, Guru Logic's download has been pulled at the request of (now defunct?) Aiky Co.

I'm planning to be playing through all of the MSXdev games during an non-narrated Let's (Quickly) Play MSXdev Games series.
Daniel Vik's Yahtzee was the first to be part of this series, but starting now I'll try to do them in order of year of release, starting with Dioniso's Penguin Race.

Alfonso D.C. aka Dioniso's Penguin Race is a MSX 16 KB ROM and is available for download from http://msxdev.msxblue.com/?page_id=48#. It's a betting game with fairly little influence for the user, featuring two playing modes.
The first game mode is available in a single player and a two player mode. You have to guess which of the 3 penguins will be the quickest at the finish. The computer (or second human player) will also pick a penguin after which the race commences.
The first to successfully guess the winner of 3 races, wins the game.

The second game mode is only available in a two player mode. Apart from picking a penguin that will hopefully win the race, each player also has to bet 1 to 4 fish each round in this mode. The goal is to be the first to get 83 fish. In this mode it can take quite a while before there's a winner though... In my humble opinion it would have been nice if the limit had been configurable. According to the readme of the game, 83 was picked because it was the year MSX was introduced.

Overall, the game is entertaining for a bit, but I still prefer a nice round of Golden Power Snails. ;-)

As usual, this recording was made using the cross-platform open source MSX emulator openMSX. For more information, see the official openMSX project page at http://openmsx.sourceforge.net/
This recording was made with 0.8.1 Development Build 12178, available from http://openmsx.fixato.net, home of the unofficial development builds of openMSX for Mac OS X and Windows x86 & x64.

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