The MSX 1 also had a hideous design flaw (for a gaming machine) that hid the framebuffer from the processor. IIRC, you had to do a couple IOs to get a single byte to or from the VRAM.
I remember the MSX2 had exactly the same flaw, it had a bigger video memory and some 2D acceleration primitives, but the access method was the same, through vpoke/vpeek.
