#msxdev Compo 2012 poll down, game music poll up

Easter day is a good day to open up a fresh new poll. But first let's have a look at the outcome of the #msxdev Compo 2012 poll. It was an unofficial poll as the competition's official poll ended with only one audience vote – not enough to point out a winner. So, prior to kicking off with the new poll, let's see who's won the MRC audience vote.

After 55 votes, this is the ranking:

• Inferno (Aetherbyte) 47.3%
• Pixiedust (Darkstone) 29.1%
• No Pressure (Flying Bytes) 12.7%
• Burner Burst (Gamecast Entertainment) 5.5%
• Barebone Bullets (syn) 3.6%
• Baruko (Gamecast Entertainment) 1.8%
• Third Screen (The New Image) 0%

The ranking has been like this for more or less the whole voting period, with no sudden shifts in the ranking. The winner (in – again - our unofficial poll) turns out to be Inferno, by Aetherbyte. The runner-up is Darkstone's Pixiedust, made in cooperation with Infinite's Edwin. There's bronze for No Pressure by Flying Bytes, the result of people learning Z80 machine language and demo coding from scratch (more or less). The latter isn't unique, it's happened before with Manbow 2. It again turns out MSX is a system where skills are easy to pick up!

The new poll (a suggestion made by hap) is all about listening to music. You can do it everywhere these days, thanks to smartphones and MP3-players. You may be listening to pop music, classical music, trance, folk, rock, you name it. Perhaps game music is also on your daily playlist. Is it? Do you actually listen to game music from 8-bit (and to some extent early 16-bit) computers/consoles on a regular basis? Naturally, MSX game music is the coolest (yeah!), but if you must you could include our neighbours-in-time too, such as the Amiga, Spectrum, C64, NES, Sega and such. The poll is mainly meant to find out how oldskool game music holds up these days, and in what form.

If you're in doubt as for what the yes-options mean: the originals are what they are; BGM-players, recordings of BGM-players, just the raw sound from a game. The commercial/official versions are like Falcom's JDK band; arrangements made/sold by the actual company. The homebrew versions are versions by us, the scene – of which you can find quite a few in our freeware downloads database and the music player in the side bar of this website.

Relevant link: #msxdev Compo 2012 poll results