> However, the fun part comes here: suppose one of us did indeed design > and build such an interface, the real challenge would lie in designing > the software around your favourite emulator, you know, drivers and > such.
I fail to see the point of doing that. If you want to use real hardware like cartridges use a real MSX, dont make huge efforts to turn your PC into an MSX. If you don't or can't use an emulator :) What would be the advantage of letting the emulator read a real cartridge? Using ROM images and emulated hardware gives much more advantages imho. > processor). The ideal way to deal with that would be to find I/O and > memory space that is not already in use, and PCI cards are always > configured in such a way that this is the case. There may be technical > difficulties, but I'm not the one to judge that, given my limited > knowledge of electronics. I could sketch the crude schematics of it, > but that's all. There are a number of reasons why you *dont* want the x86 CPU to be *directly* connected to MSX hardware. - It cannot understand Z80 instructions anyway.. - PC busses and I/O are thousands times faster than MSX hardware so would needed to be slowed down, buffered etc. - You simply dont need the speed of being directly connected to the PC busses for accessing MSX hardware. > What can the emulator do, now that it's hard-wired to a real > cartridge? It can access ROMS, I/O channels, everything you can think > of. It could also do that when the MSX cartridge was interfaced using a USB, firewire or even parallel port. > make use e.g. of the features of the Music Module, and you could > actully play music on it. All these things are just a small part of > what can actually be done with it IMHO. I have some news: you can do all of that when you switch on your real MSX ;) > That is, if one of us really gets enough inspiration to create the > device :P The device you described actually already exists. It is called the MSX card for PC, designed by PTC. Back when it was created, cpu's were much less powerfull, so they basically had to build an entire MSX on an ISA card to be able to use MSX hardware/software. The host PC is only used for its keyboard, other i/o and powersupply... Tristan + Omega + join #msx on undernet + [EMAIL PROTECTED] + | | FUNET MSX maintainer | ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/msx | + irc: OmegaMSX + Techno composer + http://members1.chello.nl/~t.zondag01 + -- For info, see http://www.stack.nl/~wynke/MSX/listinfo.html
