Gerrit van den Berg wrote: >>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, >> >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. > >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. Another option would be to use several tricks >to bypass the BIOS, but that seems to be a very timeconsuming thing to do. > So, like others said: time for a new BIOS! For MSX-DOS2 you also needed a new BIOS. So, for DOS3, it would also be 'normal' to use a new BIOS, which would of course be compatible with the DOS2 bios. The only thing you need to do is replace your DOS2 BIOS (a simple EPROM).
Or, when ag0ny is right: run it from RAM. We should not forget about the BIOS completely, since then it won't be compatible anymore with DOS2, I suppose. (If I'm talking rubbish, please tell me! ;-) But theoretically speaking, it should be possible to create a DOS2 compatible DOS3, which supports more than 8 driveletters and FAT16. If we need a new DOS-(or BIOS) ROM for that, so be it. It's indeed the logical step forwards. And all old programs should still be able to run on it, if things are done properly... -- 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
