MSX Tribute Radio streams chiptune and game soundtracks from the MSX home computer era, live and around the clock. Press play on Radio Shuffle and it streams instantly, free, with no account or app download required.
A tribute built by the community it serves
The station was launched by a user going by MSX-ALL, who announced it on the MSX Resource Center community site on 1 February 2021, according to the original announcement. It started in beta, admittedly needing "a lot of cleanup and organizing," and offered listeners both a direct web stream and a downloadable playlist for players like VLC. Fans showed up immediately with requests in the comments, from timeslots for specific developers' soundtracks to pushing the station beyond the chips' simplest PSG sound channel toward richer SCC, FMPAC and OPL4 tracks, the kind of detailed, chip-by-chip feedback only a dedicated retro computing community would offer.
The Japanese standard that became a world computer
MSX itself has an unusual origin story for a home computer standard. It was conceived by Kazuhiko Nishi, an executive at ASCII Corporation working jointly with Microsoft, as a standardized platform for the Japanese market, announced in the summer of 1983, according to Wikipedia's history of the platform. The first machine to reach the public, a Mitsubishi model, arrived that October. Rather than staying a niche Japanese product, MSX caught on across Asia, South America and Europe, with real followings in Korea, Brazil, Chile, the Netherlands, Spain and Finland, even as it barely registered in the United States, leaving behind decades of regionally distinct game libraries and soundtracks for stations like this one to draw from.
Listen free on Radio Shuffle
MSX Tribute Radio streams around the clock, and Radio Shuffle carries the feed live with nothing to install and no subscription required. Press play for chiptunes from a computer standard that built entire gaming cultures outside the usual American and Japanese console story.