Gerrit van den Berg wrote:
>I spoke with Fokke Post last Saturday and we discussed recent talks about
>a new MSX-DOS with full FAT 16 support. According to Fokke this is not
>that easy to make, because of the current BIOS limitations.
Then expand the BIOS. MegaSCSI BIOS already uses 24 bit sector addresses
(IIRC) and AFAIK Sunrise IDE does also.
>Current BIOS is located in a chip on the mainboard of the MSX or in a
>seperate cartridge. MSX-DOS2 uses a lot of the internal functions of this
>BIOS. Making a new DOS would almost certainly consist in making a new BIOS
>which has to be placed on a chip that can be placed on a cartridge
>(Sunrise IDE?) or into the MSX itself.
Logically. MSX-DOS3 should be downwards compatible with MSX-DOS2, which is
downwards compatible with MSX-DOS(1). So devices must be MSX-DOS3
compatible to be able to use MSX-DOS3 functions.
When a MSX-DOS3 surfaces, interface developers can upgrade their BIOS to
comply with the new MSX-DOS3 standard. This is the normal way things go in
computerland...
I don't see any reason to replace the standard Disk BIOS on the mainboard
of the MSX, I believe only additional devices need new BIOS support. Who
needs FAT16 support on their 720kB diskdrive?
And even without new BIOSes it should be easy to allow more than 8 drives.
MSX-DOS3 could use a limit of 8 drives PER BIOS and map different drive
letters to them. A MSX-DOS3 compatible BIOS could ofcourse use 16 or 26
drive letters.
Greetz,
Patriek
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