After some fans asking him to include the Yamaha V9990 VDP in the MSX3 standard (in a rude fashion) he responded sharply that he won't include it due their history together:
Kazuhiko Nishi on Twitter 2022-01-14Nishi wrote: Yamaha fail to deliver 9978(later 9990) in time for MSX3. That was the reason name changed to Turbo R. We had only fast CPU. Then Pana used delayed Video chip without our consent saying extra fanctions will be machine depanding non MSX functions.
then by the side, yamaha gave the knowhows of video chip to nintendo and created super famicom without telling us anything. Was that a fair business practices? We dont think so. So we decided not to use 9990 for ever.
we will support uptill 9958 and any future expantion will be strong sprites and 2K and 4K high speed video drawings. All the yamaha patents are expired and now free to use. anyone can copy 9990 but 6 to 12 month work and no resources to do and dont want to delay msx3 launch.
Some quick background: the MSX used the well-known Texas Instrument TMS9918 VDP as its video chip (which were also used by many other systems such as ColecoVision, Sega's console/computer and probably also partly inspired Nintendo's PPU), and ASCII ordered Yamaha to create an upgraded version of it when they updated the standard to MSX2. The result was the Yamaha V9938 MSX-VIDEO, and then they did so again when upgrading to the MSX2+, which was a very small update with the V9958 (basically only adding another scroll axis and a few new modes). Finally they ordered the V9978 from Yamaha for the upcoming MSX3, but Yamaha failed to deliver and they changed the name of the MSX3 to MSX Turbo R (as Nishi said above) due to this, since they only had a new faster CPU (R800) and more RAM for this new MSX standard, not a new VDP as promised. Yamaha finalized the new VDP but it was rejected, so they stripped it down, removing its backwards-compatibility with the V9958, and renamed it the V9990. They used it in some computer video cards I think, and the Dutch company Sunrise made the GFX9000 MSX cartridge (1994), allowing to use it as an external video card for any MSX, and a few other companies released similar products using the chip. A few MSX "homebrew" games that uses it do exists.
Thoughts about this (or even the MSX3)?