ag0ny wrote: > Manuel,
Hey ag0ny! > Who said ASCII is going to release the sources, or even the documents? > Who started this rumour? Well, Nishi said so in Den-Yu Land, didn't he? ANyway, see below... > department and told me that ASCII doesn't have the copyright for these > products. As a publishing company, they only have the distribution > rights. MSX-DOS was made by Microsoft, MSX-DOS2 by Madge Corp. > (http://www.madge.co.uk), and MSX-C was made by a company called How about asking Madge then, via ASCII? > LSI-Japan. And redistribution of these programs (even on their website) > would cost ASCII money, so they won't do that. Still? > About the MSX2 Technical Handbook, I suggested him making a > PDF/PostScript version of it and making it freely available. But he said > that was not possible. He said that a reprint COULD be done, if there > were enough users insterested on it (I told him that I'd be very > surprised if more than 100 users bought the book). A reprint seems useless, indeed. > Anyway, I don't think that having the sources of MSX-DOS(2) would help. > Cloning an OS is not that hard: we know all the functions and their > input and output parameters. We also know the system variables. Cloning > MSX-DOS would be as easy as cloning the behaviour of its functions. > Moreover, the MSXDOS.SYS file is just 2Kb long. Not too hard to > dissassemble and understand. Well, go ahead then! ;-) You know, SoLiD (from Novatec!) even redid parts of it... Ah no, that was command2.com... Which was reengineered by Fokke Post also, 2.41.... (which rules!). But I guess you're right. Then, would it be hard to hack in more than 8 drives and FAT16 support, whilst staying compatible with DOS? > And the case of the MSX2 Technical Handbook is even easier: Nestor > Soriano typed the whole text and there are many, many photocopies of it > running around. It wouldn't be too hard for a group of people to type > the text using LyX or LaTeX (or copy & paste from Nestor's > transcription), and draw the figures using xfig. I've made this already > with MSX-DOS2 documents and the resulting PostScript file is available > in http://www.ag0ny.com/docs (136 pages). Nice TeXing! But as you know, it's a friggin' lot of work! I TeXed the manual of Daisenryaku Kyanpeen-ban a couple of years ago, and that took me weeks and weeks. So, with some effort it can of course be done. > So you want an OpenSource MSX-DOS clone and full documentation? Ok, then > let's start working on it. I've been thinking about this for sime time > now, and I think it's time we start. I even registered the domain some > time ago (http://www.msxsg.org) but didn't have the time or motivation msxsg? > to start working on it. I'll post information about the project(s) this > week. I'll post a message here as soon as the information is available, > but people interested in helping please send me an email now so I > include you in the list. People who are good at this, PLEASE HELP US! I'm afraid I'm not good enough in asm programming to be able to help, but people like e.g. Fokke Post or Jon de Schrijder (experience with DOS hacking... ;-) or others, please let us know! -- Grtjs, Manuel PS: MSX 4EVER! (Questions? See http://www.faq.msxnet.org/) PPS: Visit my homepage: http://bilderbeek.cjb.net/ -- For info, see http://www.stack.nl/~wynke/MSX/listinfo.html
