Thanks to visiting a lot of car boot sales in the late 90s I can surmise
that the most popular MSX machine to sell in the UK was the Toshiba HX-10. I only picked up 2 or
3 at the time but wish I'd picked up more - in the 3 years I was collecting there was easily a
couple of dozen for sale/giveaway. The one I ended up keeping was the last 'please buy all our
stock of the HX-10 because we have the HX-22 out now which is pretty much the same because it's
MSX but pleeeeeease buy the HX-10' bundled box set which included:
HX-10 machine (boxed)!
Tape recorder (boxed)!
Games tapes!
A blank tape!
Plugs!
and a screwdriver so you could fit the plugs yourself!
I'm pleased to report that whoever put the plugs on this unit did a good
job, and the plugs are correctly fitted with 3A fuses. Splendid. A common complaint about the
HX-10 today is the keyboard and you'll often find them for sale with 'keys don't work' type
posts, or forum posts with 'keys are dead'. Having refurbished my Sony HitBit HB75 MSX I pondered
if the reason the HX-10 keyboards were failing was the same reason the HB-75's keyboard did, so
I dug out my HX-10 bundle to test it, and to my annoyance the keyboard was fine :oD
However, using my patented* two-screwdriver-attack method I popped the Z
keycap off and saw that the keyswitch is the same Alps mechanism from the HitBit. No surprise I
suppose. Should it fail in the future I'll know how to fix it. Machine is fine, and still looks
new as does its box.