On Tue, 11 Jul 2000, "Šiogo" Sperb Schneider wrote:
> I wonder how much the DISK.ROM you're using influence
> on the behaviour of the MSX... Does it specify which
> files it will look for into the floppy disk to boot
> from? I don't even know how a bootable MSX disk works,
> I don't know what files must be present...
MSXDOS1 and games are started by code in the boot sector of the disk.
When a disk is formatted on MSX, the boot sector will contain code that
looks for MSXDOS.SYS and starts that if it's found. If it doesn't exist and
it's the first boot, the routine will return. If it doesn't exist and it's
not the first boot, a message like "Non system disk error" will be printed
and loading MSXDOS.SYS will be retried after a keypress. The system
variable #F346 is used to distinguish first boot from others (also useful
to enable the CALL SYSTEM command in BASIC).
The boot sector code is also the reason why a PC-formatted disk will
probably hang your MSX when booting from it: the PC bootsector contains x86
code instead of Z80 code.
> When I had
> my MSX, BASIC was my environment, so the only "boot
> file" I'd know was AUTOEXEC.BAS. :)
AUTOEXEC.BAS is checked after the boot sector, which is why DOS is booted
on disks that contain both DOS and AUTOEXEC.BAS.
Bye,
Maarten
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