Do you support MSX development? Then donate to developers
Posted by Javi Lavandeira in MSX, Rants, Retro | January 20, 2015This shocked me yesterday. If you’re an MSX user then you may have heard about Nestor Soriano (AKA konamiman). He’s the guy who developed:
- Nextor, a new operating system for MSX (which I will talk about in the future on this blog), fully compatible with MSX-DOS2 and with FAT16 support
- NestorBASIC, an extended, more powerful version of MSX BASIC
- NestorPreTer, a new MSX BASIC preprocessor to make programming in MSX BASIC easier
- InterNestor Lite, a full TCP/IP stack for MSX2/2+/turbo R computers (yes, allows you to connect your MSX to the Internet)
- A bunch of Internet applications for MSX, including Dropbox, Twitter, FTP, Windows shared folders, clock synchronization via NTP, wget client…
- Firmware for MSX peripherals: ObsoNET and DenYoNet (Ethernet cards for MSX), MegaFlashROM SCC+ SD (interface to use SD cards as hard drives on the MSX), Tecnobytes’ IDE cartridge, etc.
If you’re keeping your MSX equipment up to date, the chances are high that you’re using for free something he has created, because that’s what he does: he gives all of this to the MSX community for free.
So what shocked me yesterday?
Well, I noticed that he asks for donations to help with his MSX development. I thought that there would be lots of people helping him and donating some money. Do you want to try and guess how many patrons he had in his Patreon page?
ZERO. NOBODY. NADA.
Thaaat’s right. Nestor is creating lots of high-quality software for MSX and also helping hardware developers, and nobody’s bothering to give him a buck or two for his effort.
Konamiman’s Patreon. That lonely patron there is me. Click to enlarge.
So I went and became his first patron. I pledged $10 per release of whatever he produces.
Now you go do the same
Nestor is giving his products to everybody for free and is helping keeping the MSX alive. If you think this is important, then go to his Patreon page and pledge some amount and show that you care.
If you don’t care, then don’t.
Very good point… Fixd…
Many thanks for spreading the word! :-) Anyway I must say that I have actually received some one-time donations via PayPal, and I even have a recurring one.
Also, just for completeness: I haven’t developed the firmware (the SD card driver and the recovery ROM) for the MegaFlashROM SCC+ SD. Manuel Pazos himself did it, then wrapped a Nextor kernel around it by using the tool that I developed for that purpose.
Done.