At 02:53 PM 3/18/99 -0300, you wrote:
>> Philips 8235, 8245, 8250, 8255 and 8280 were all sold with 128K mapper.
>
>Only Philips did it? Did other manufacturers do only 256kb of Mapper
>built-in?
I think there may be a few. Manual would probably say "check the hardware
list". Philips MSX2 machines (which were built by Sanyo, by the way) were
very popular in Holland.
>> ROM version of Royal Blood is 1MB.
>
>8-megabit Megarom??? That's impressive! Is it downloadable in any site?
I don't think so. I know it exists because Takamichi has one. It contains a
bit of SRAM as well. There is also a disk version of this game, so the ROM
version is interesting mostly as a curiousity.
I have also seen a Korean compilation cartridge (probably illegal) which
contains many 16K ROMs combined in a single cartridge. It had a ROM of 2MB.
I still have the ROM image on my harddisk.
>>> Why didn't people from Japan create a kind of Megaram?
>>
>> Maybe they don't like doing illegal things?
>
>Take it easy!
Don't get me wrong, I copied lots of MSX games. Only recently I started
buying games (MSX and PSX). Now I have a part-time job (Java programming)
and I can afford them, before I needed all my money for hardware (MSX2,
color monitor, FM-PAC).
I get the feeling the Japanese are not as fanatical crackers and copiers
like Dutch, Spanish or Brazillians. Although maybe under the surface the
Japanese are not the perfect citizens they may appear to be? Otherwise, why
would games released for the Japanese market alone be copy protected?
>I was talking about one manufacturer (for example, Konami)
>sells Megaram cartridges and sell disks with the games separately. This
>would be much cheaper.
If they wanted to go for disks, they wouldn't really need a MegaRAM
cartridge. They would just write the game in such a way that it runs on the
internal RAM. After all, Japanese MSX2/2+ software all works on 64K RAM.
Cartridge is extra quality (no loading time, more durable) compared to
disk. Also, it is harder to copy.
>> In Europe, for a long time software was available in normal stores. But
>
>Was Japanese software available in normal stores?
Software from Japanese software companies was released in Europe. Examples:
Nemesis 1, 2 and 3, Metal Gear 1, King's Valley 2 (only MSX1 version).
>> around 1990 we had to rely on imports for games like SD Snatcher and Solid
>> Snake.
>
>Importing games? Wasn't it too slow and too expensive?
It was slow and expensive, but clubs offered that service and it was used.
It was the only way to get originals.
By the way, SD Snatcher is more expensive now than it was back then...
>Total: 71 clockcicles. Conclusion: you're right, it's not possible to use
>1.2Mb or 1.44Mb disks with Z80 at 3.57MHz. It's BAD!
Henrik Gilvad once told me.
>Then, there's still a chance only for Turbo-R.
The built-in FDC can handle HD according to Henrik. But you would need to
write a new diskROM...
For normal MSX1/2/2+, 7MHz is an option. But old FDCs can't handle HD
speeds either, so they would have to be replaced.
Another option is to use some kind of buffered hardware. Like Superdisk
connected to IDE, as Peter Burkhard mentioned.
But a Superdisk drive is quite expensive, maybe someone wants to make a
buffered HD floppy interface? It could be very simple: two banks of 512
bytes (1 sector) of RAM. Could be two ICs or a single dual-ported IC. One
bank is filled by the FDC, while the other is LDIR-ed to MSX main RAM.
Although 3.5MHz is too slow for polling the FDC, it would be fast enough
for LDIR-ing. After LDIR-ing an entire sector it would poll for moment the
next sector is available.
It would be a real benefit:
- 720K disks are hard to find, 1.44MB disks are still available everywhere
- double the amount of data fits on a single disk
- disk transfer rate is doubled, making your MSX load faster
Anyone interested in making a prototype?
Bye,
Maarten
****
MSX Mailinglist. To unsubscribe, send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put
in the body (not subject) "unsubscribe msx [EMAIL PROTECTED]" (without the
quotes :-) Problems? contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] (www.stack.nl/~wiebe/mailinglist/)
****
