Let's rewrite your sentence by just substituting "powerful workstation" by "emulator":
If emulators had just given free to everyone, of course there wouldn't have been any MSX. Who would have wanted MSX then?
By that reasoning, why would you use an emulator when you can just use the system the emulator runs on and not care about MSX at all? Anyone using MSX now is driven by passion.
People who want to own real hardware will buy real hardware. People who don’t care about real hardware but would like to relive a bit of the old days won’t (the other day my dad downloaded an MSX emulator on iOS and played some Penguin Wars). People who do not have so much room may have an MSX computer but keep it in storage to only take out occasionally. People who develop may have their MSX systems set up for testing (and buy a lot of hardware for testing purposes, ahem), but still mostly work with emulators. Everybody has their own reasons.
@zPasi: Different observer times. If that hypothetical emulation existed back in the 80's, the MSX would have survived a few years, but not until today. Now that emulation is not hypothetical, but real, the MSX still survives... but not so many years.
MrSpock: If it would work like that, then nobody would use MSX today. Everybody already has far more powerful hardware for decades. Passion for MSX is driven by irrational reasons, like nostalgia, or fondness of that great SCC music, and for us developers, appreciation of those very constraints.
Why is pixel art super popular now when hardware is far more capable than that? For similar reasons.
Before I forget again, I'd like to thank the people who mailed me about Manbow 2. My email was not accessible for some time, so I got the mail only little late. But it works now, and no mail is lost. Thanks guys.
@Grauw: It is just a matter of time. Emulation is too recent and hasn't had the time to fully jeopardize MSX. As for pixel art being popular... it is in style, that's all.
1994 - 2000 : pre or non emulator era.
2000 - 2009 : emulator era.
2009 - 2016: very implanted emulator era.
We can focus in pre and very emulator era. 6 years.
How many Dutch games I could buy in the 94-00 non emulator era?
How many Dutch games I can buy in the 2009-2015 very implanted era?
You must be joking... How can you correlate the size of the community to the existence of emulators? Time passes, community of an old computer shrinks as less people use it and the people who do are having jobs and not so much free time for hobby programming anymore. Back in the 90s I was in high school and my MSX was my only computer. It’s an entirely logical progression and I don’t see any reason or evidence or even plausible theory why this would be related to the existence of emulators.
Indeed, like Grauw I completely fail to see why you think there's a relation of emulators with the amount of MSX activity over time... How do you know so sure that emulators are causing this?
