What if PC ..... never existed?

I think MSX1 relied on 70s tech to get out of the gate more quickly, and it had to be done relatively cheaply if they had any hope to remain on the market at that moment. V9938 and V9958 are more or less logical evolutions of the TMS9918 if they wanted to focus on personal computing instead of gaming, which would be essential if they wanted the MSX to survive competition with cheaper and more powerful video game consoles. Indeed, the MSX video chips are more powerful than many of their contemporaries in home computers.

Plus, the way system extensions were designed look to me they were already thinking of the platform's future very early. It was effectively plug and play a decade before that technology started appearing on PCs. Of course this worked much better when the standard was rigorously followed (which unfortunately not always happened), but it was visionary nonetheless, IMHO.

But due to the MSX's many similarities to the PC, if there was no PC I think the MSX would be a very different beast from it, perhaps inspired in whatever other platform dominated the business landscape at the time. Maybe it would be some kind of CP/M machine with advanced graphics, perhaps using one of the Motorola video generators.

I never use interlaced modes. It's too distasteful to watch.

Well, Atari ST was conceived as an as-cheap-as-possible machine. It doesn't have superior graphics or sound compared to MSX, but since it's 16-bit it really has more computing performance. And I like that it came with MIDI.

Hey, I didn't say that! It was @zPasi

But he was right in that you mentioned V9990, and the higher resolutions supported by the MSX cartridges that used the V9990 were interlaced (and "distasteful") as well.

An interesting alternative reality: Imagine if the MSX standard had been based on the 8088 instead of the Z80. Like the actual MSX, it would have been intended as a cheap home-computer version of the PC. However, it would have been more similar to the PC than the MSX actually was. It would probably have been compatible with a subset of the PC standard, and at the same time it would have extended the PC's graphics and sound capabilities for the gaming market.

There was actually a computer like that, produced by IBM itself in 1984, called "PC Jr". While the PC Jr failed commercially, perhaps the idea would have flourished if it had been developed as an MSX-like standard.

In this alternative reality, perhaps MSX would have undercut the cheap PC clone market that developed later. IBM would have realised that MSX had won somewhere around 1990, and instead of doing the PS/2 line, they would have dropped the original PC in favour of MSX.

And today we would be marvelling at the fact that, thanks to Microsoft's focus on backwards compatibility, we would still be able to play Penguin Adventure on our MSX tablets and smartphones.

Actually x86 pc - misleading term. The 8086 286 and 386... three different worlds. There is no point to have 286, if you don't use 16bit protected mode, also there is no point to have 386 if you don't use 32bit protected mode. All three types of machines have own software model, so you may think of them as about three different computer architectures. Yes 286 and 386 may be used as fast performers of 8086, but it's not make them 8086 family cpus (8088 8086 80186). VAX machines also had pdp11 cpu cards and were able to run RT11 and RSX, but vax is not pdp11. Same here, 386 is not 8086. So, if 8086 had fail Intel would develop iAPX432 or i960 and won the market anyway (just because they knew how to make cpus and their fabs are best). Motorola, NatSemi, MIPS, SPARC, ARM .... all of them fail because they don't have such a good fabs as Intel.