The other day I got a copy of the Japanese version of Metal Gear. It's still on route as I write this. And I was wondering, when it gets here, how would I know if it works? Metal Gear for the MSX is the only Konami game that's region locked and you need a Japanese MSX to make it work - and I don't own one.

Other than knowing if Metal Gear works, I'd actually would want to play it! And there's a whole bunch of other games that also change apearance or behaviour depending on the region of the MSX they're running on. Sounds like fun to be able to see that happening using the real cartridge! So, let's figure out if there's a workaround!

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The Technical Data Book explanation for the LINE command wasn't very easy to wrap my head around. It's definitely more complex than the BASIC LINE command! Finally got it to work, so here's a quick write-up for my future self. And hopefully will benefit someone else one day.

Going to presume it's clear how to use the VDP commands in general, this is a quick explanation of the LINE command and just focusing on those registers.

I'm thinking that a practical example with pseudo code will probably work better than formulating a wordy explanation.

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The GR8NET is a beautiful piece of equipment. It's not always user-friendly though and the manual can be overwhelming. Here are the steps I took for the lastest update to v0.12

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