RE: Software FD
too bad it's all going so-so... the FD is a great medium. Maybe something can be worked out with the people from MCCW? Cheers, Marco [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] : -Original Message- : From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] : Sent: 18 August 2000 08:49 : To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] : Subject: Software FD : : : : : : Hi all, : : As most of you probably know, we (FutureDisk) are going to : quit the MSX scene when we reach FD#50. We already : announced this on FD#39, where we also announced that : roughly half of our disks to come would be normal magazines : and the other half would be Software FD's. : : We have now experienced that not only filling a magazine is : becoming very hard (because there's not much new stuff to : review), but also that filling a Software FD is very hard. : : Our question to you all is very simple: If you are still : thinking of finishing (or finally starting) that 'ultimate' : game/demo/music-disk, then LET US KNOW, because we are VERY : interested. : : We have just under 200 members, so we can guarantee that a : lot of people in a lot of countries (the Netherlands, : Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, JAPAN, etc.) are : going to play/see/hear your software. : : Of course we understand that you don't want to do this : for free ;-) : : Hope to hear from you soon! : : Jeroen Smael : FutureDisk : : PS. For all of you who DON'T know the FutureDisk (is there : anyone who hasn't heard of us?), here's our homepage: : http://www.futuredisk.msxnet.org/ : : : : : Problems? contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] See also http://www.faq.msxnet.org/ : Problems? contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] See also http://www.faq.msxnet.org/
Re: Software FD
too bad it's all going so-so... the FD is a great medium. Maybe something can be worked out with the people from MCCW? Heheh... Of course we would welcome all authors of FD. But... I think they don't want themselves! You see, as far as I know, they just don't have the motivation anymore. In case I am wrong: PLEASE JOIN US! ;-) Actually, that goes for anyone. Best regards, Manuel --- PS: MSX 4 EVER! (Questions? See: http://www.faq.msxnet.org/) PPS: Visit my home page at http://bilderbeek.cjb.net/ Problems? contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] See also http://www.faq.msxnet.org/
Re: Software FD
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: lot of people in a lot of countries (the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, JAPAN, etc.) are Why not Brazil? []s, -Parn (ICQ#1693182) /| | | |\ \| ___ |/ http://parn.overclocked.org/ \/ - \/ Parn's Music Station | | Game Music XMs and more! -- --Izati Aba Mehinam Eto Kafe Nan Problems? contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] See also http://www.faq.msxnet.org/
IMPORTANT NEWS FROM ASCII
Javi Lavandeira, the webmaster of www.aamsx.org, is currently in Japan and he had yesterday an interview with Nishi, Yamashita, Yokoi and Gotou from ASCII corp. This is the english translation of the message he sent to the spanish MSX mailing list: --- ASCII wants to make a new MSX. And this is not a rumour. I repeat: this is not a rumour. And it is not only that "they want" to make it, but actually they are already working on it. It is a three phase project: * Phase 1 - Develop the ASCII official MSX emulator This emulator is already almost finished and it will be presented on Den-yu land 2000. It will emulate MSX, MSX2 and MSX2+ as well as a PC can emulate it. If I understood correctly, from now on they do not worry about Turbo-R. Once finished, english, spanish and portuguese versions of the emulator will be developped. And *MAYBE* (I repeat: maybe) MSX DataPack (+1000 pages) will be translated to these three languages. Phase 1 status: The emulator will be finished in approximately one month. * Phase 2 - Develop and sell software which will work both in real MSX and in the emulator ASCII will release an internet server for selling MSX software. There will be free software and pay software. Nishi already spoke with Konami and Namco and they will sell here their old programs *AND THE ONES DEVELOPPED FROM NOW ON*. Amongst the free software there will be software from amateur groups (not necessarily japanese). ASCII will obtain a percent of the benefits for the software sell through this server. Phase 2 status: The software to be used for the server is already developped, and ASCII has negotiated with NTT the internet payment system details. When the emulator is officially released, the server will be put online. * Phase 3 - Develop a new MSX. The new MSX will have a 100 MHz or 120 MHz Z80 , 4Mb RAM and 4Mb VRAM. About the rest of the hardware, they do not know yet exactly what they will do, because there is two simultaneous developping works: 1) ESE Artist's Factory is using reverse engineering to build the MSX circuits using PLD technology. There is already finished and 100% working PSG, SCC and V9918. Z80 is not needed to be copied because it is a very common chip. Now they are working on V9938/58. 2) ASCII has already negotiated with Sega the making of the new machine. Yokoi commented that they can start to produce it when they wants to do it.Contrarywise to the ESE option, now all the MSX circuits are integrated in one, so production is very cheap. They are negotiating now the selling price: 19800 yens the complete machine. ASCII finds this price too cheap (this is very logical because they want to earn money). Phase 3 status: negotiating with SEGA while ESE work on the VDP. The ones who first finish will win, because ASCII do not want to wait. Yamashita says that now is the perfect moment to release a cheap home computer which can be a reasonable alternative to PC. As you can see, things are not as bas as we though . Will we successfully reach phase 3? It depends on the amount of software sell, because what ASCII wants is to earn money selling software through its internet server. Benefits for selling computers will be very small. By the way, I did not only to hear during the interview. One of the problems exposed by Yamashita is the VDP: they doubt between use a VDP at the same speed, so the new machine will be unusable (4Mb VRAM with a so slow VDP is a nonsense), or put a new VDP four times faster but incompatible with old software. I proposed a solution: enable Z80 to directly access VRAM by mapping it into its addressing space as if it were normal VRAM (same thing is done by Ademir Carchano's ADVRAM ). It seems that they had not though on this solution and they liked it a lot, so if the new MSX uses this system you know who you must thank! ;-) Wednesday 23 at 13:00 (Tokyo hour) I'll return to ASCII to speak again with Yamashita, Yokoi and Gotou. If you have any suggestion, send me via email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (don't use the mailing list, because there will be a discussion with thousands of messages about the characteristics which the new MSX should incorporate). Regards. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.aamsx.org *** NEXT BARCELONA MSX USERS MEETING: DECEMBER 9TH *** -- Konami Man - AKA Nestor Soriano (^ ^)v Itsumo MSX user [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://konamiman.msx.tni.nl Kyoko Koizumi home page (under construction): http://www.geocities.com/tamachan1976/index.html -- Problems? contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] See also http://www.faq.msxnet.org/
No Subject
Hello, This is a pretty long mail, so I shall start by describing it and thus letting you know if you want to read on or not. This mail handles about joynet. I want there to be a standard protocol for communicating over joynet. In the introduction I shall talk about why and when this protocol should be used. The reason I am posting this mail to the mailinglist and the newsgroup is that of course this protocol must be used by everyone. It should be part of the standard that in certain situation a standard protocol is used. I have designed such a protocol, but now I want you, the MSX community, to propose changes/propose a totally new protocol/agree with this protocol, so that in the end, we'll have a protocol that everyone likes and therefore everyone will use. So you shoul read this if you want to help developing the new standard joynet protocol and if you just want to see the prototype. If not, the rest of this mail will not interest you. Please read it while typing a reply, because that way you will not have forgotten most of your comments when you're finished reading :) 0. Version and copyright. This is version shevek-281700a of this document. This document may be freely copied, provided the version number is correctly updated. The version number consists of the name of the last person who made a change, followed by a dash, a serial number and optionally a letter. The serial number should (until the year 1) contain exactly 10 digits, the first 8 of which encode a date. The first 4 are the year. The 5th and 6th are the month, ranging 01-12. The last two digits are the day of the month. Example: the 17th of august 2000 is 2817. This date should be the day of writing. The last two digits of the serial number are the serial number for that day. This should only be different from `00' if more than 1 version of the document is written that day. Additionally, a `a' or `b' may be added if the document is considered alpha or beta (no characters other than ascii in the range 32-127 are allowed in the document, so don't try to make alpha's and beta's. If constructed this way, higher serial numbers will always be later versions of the document. This does not mean it is more up to date. An author can change an old document and add a new serial number. Anyway, let's get to the point. 1. Terminology In this document, every time I said she/her/... it could equally well have been he/his/... I just didn't feel like typing she/he all the time. 2. Introduction Some time ago, joynet was developed for the MSX computer. It is a describtion of a standard cable, which is to be used to connect computers when a network is desired. A protocol was not added to the standard, because it was left to the freedom of the coder to use whatever protocol she wants. This is nice in the case of a program, run on two computers, like a game. But when a program just wants to connect to `the network', without knowing what program is on the other side of the connection, a standard protocol needs to be used. This document intends to describe such a protocol. It is still very alpha. 3. When JUMP should be used If a coder wants to make a program (probably a game) that should run on multiple computers, she may use any protocol she desires. If she has a way of knowing what the other side of the connection does, for example because it also runs her software, she does not need to follow JUMP. It is advisable however, to check if the computer is at that time in a JUMP network, because the network would be suffering from the (for JUMP) bogus packets that seem to keep coming in. JUMP should be used to connect to a network in general. If the coder doesn't know what the network is, for applications like NFS, telnet and ftp. In such a case using JUMP is mandatory. 4. Why JUMP should be used The reason to have a standard protocol is simple. many coders can make many network programs and they all want to communicate with each other. If there is no standard protocol, every computer would need drivers for all protocols. Drivers? Most programs would probably not even offer the possibility for custom network drivers. So a program written by X can only communicate with other software written by X. This is a highly undesirable situation and therefore JUMP was designed. So all the coder has to do is use it. 5. What joynet is Joynet is a standard for a network cable. It can connect MSX's in a ring via their joystick ports. between each two computers, there are 3 lines: The lines connected to button A and B are on the other side connected to steer up and down respectively. The line connected to steer left is connected to the strobe on the other side. For an exact description of the cable, see the joynet homepage by Grauw, `www.fixme.nl'. The information here is all the coder needs. In the rest of this document, I shall address the lines by the letters A, B and C. A and B are the lines comping from the buttons. C is the line going to steer
Joynet
oops, I forgot to describe the packet header. Well, we can discuss about
that later anyway. I think this should be enough already for quite some
time to fight about ;)
Bye,
main(){int c[4] ,x=4 ,l=getpid() ,i;; for( srand(l);c[ x]=- rand
()%6 ,x-- ;);; for( ;44 x;){ char a[9] ,*p=
"%.1f\n", b[9];x=i=0; gets(a);for (l=4 ;l-- ;)x+=-(a[l] -=48)==
(b[l ]=c[ l]); ;for (l=0;16i;l =++i %4)x
+=(b[i/4]+ a[l] ?0:( a[l]=b[i/4] =10)) ;printf(p,x *.1) ;};}
Problems? contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] See also http://www.faq.msxnet.org/
Re: IMPORTANT NEWS FROM ASCII
This emulator is already almost finished No. Obviously Nasu bluffed to ASCII. and it will be presented on Den-yu land 2000. It will emulate MSX, MSX2 and MSX2+ as well as a PC can emulate it. If I understood correctly, from now on they do not worry about Turbo-R. Once finished, english, spanish and portuguese versions of the emulator will be developped. And *MAYBE* (I repeat: maybe) MSX DataPack (+1000 pages) will be translated to these three languages. Phase 1 status: The emulator will be finished in approximately one month. No. In fact I know who is developing that "ASCII-listed emulator" which is expected to run on Indent, the rather unknown OS created by ASCII. Currently, he hasn't even learned Indent sematics. Also, I personally will be very crossed if he'll try to simply copy fMSX- or RuMSX (or, though I see few possibility, BrMSX) codes and inform Marat/Rudolf/Ricardo of cheating. Takamichi Problems? contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] See also http://www.faq.msxnet.org/
Re: (Joynet protocol)
On Fri, 18 Aug 2000, you wrote:
3. When JUMP should be used
The term "JUMP" is not introduced...
JUMP = Joynet Univeral Message Protocol?
If a coder wants to make a program (probably a game) that should run on
multiple computers, she may use any protocol she desires. If she has a way
of knowing what the other side of the connection does, for example because
it also runs her software, she does not need to follow JUMP. It is
advisable however, to check if the computer is at that time in a JUMP
network, because the network would be suffering from the (for JUMP) bogus
packets that seem to keep coming in.
How can a node (single computer in the network) determine whether its
neighbours use JUMP or not? Especially, how can it do so without causing
problems with other protocols?
4. Why JUMP should be used
The reason to have a standard protocol is simple. many coders can make many
network programs and they all want to communicate with each other. If there
is no standard protocol, every computer would need drivers for all
protocols.
In the case where there is only 1 application running on the network, JUMP is
not necessary. However, if you want to create a Joynet ring that really acts
like a network, a protocol like JUMP is necessary. So JUMP is good for TCP/IP
over Joynet, file serving and such.
In the rest of this document, I shall address the lines by the letters A, B
and C. A and B are the lines comping from the buttons. C is the line going
to steer left. A and B are outgoing lines and C is an incoming line on one
side. With the computer on the other side, A and B are incoming and C is
outgoing.
What about naming them "dat0", "dat1" and "ack"? Those names are easier to
remember. Also, it should be made explicit whether the link with the previous
or next node is mentioned: prev.dat0, prev.dat1 and next.ack are inputs,
next.dat0, next.dat1 and prev.ack are outputs.
6.1. General overview
Jump is a protocol that works in packets. There are positive and negative
sides to that. The most important negative point is that the sending
computer has to wait for the receiving computer to be ready. The most
important positive point is that the data flow can be bidirectional.
I don't understand: why are these properties consequences of using packets?
By the way, are there low-level network protocols that do not send data in
packets? I can't remember seeing one.
6.2. Sending a packet
Before sending, a send request (SR) should be given. After that, the
sending computer has to wait for a reaction (and check for collisions, see
below). When the client has seen a send request, it sends a clear to send
(CTS). After that, the transmission begins. It works as follows:
In modem terminology, isn't SR called RTS (Request To Send)?
Sender sends header
Receiver sends CRC1 and packet size back for confirmation
Sender sends confirmation
While (packetlength = 32) {
Sender sends 32 bytes of the packet
Receiver sends CRC0
Sender sends confirmation
first 32 bytes are cut off packet
}
Sender sends remaining bytes of packet
Receiver sends CRC0
Sender sends confirmation
Receiver sends CRC1
Sender sends confirmation
Why are packets split up into 32 byte chunks? Usually, packets are the
"atoms" of network communication.
This is the complete transmission of a packet. CRC0 is a 8 bit CRC on the
data that has just been received. CRC1 is a 32 bit CRC of all received
bytes*3.
I think we had this discussion before, but 32 bit CRC is overkill for small
chunks of data. For example, MSX floppy uses 16 bit CRC for sectors (512
bytes long).
Sending of
bytes is done by sending the bits on a timed basis, as is shown.
Timing has some serious disadvantages:
- it depends on how strong the joystick port drives the signals
(probably not equal for all MSX types)
- it depends on cable length
(actually capacity, but length is probably the most important factor)
- it means the interrupt must be disabled when doing JUMP transfers
- it is hard to program on PCs
(file serving, internet connection, MSX emulators)
Both wait a time t1
Receiver reads bit [i;i+1|i] from [AB|C]
Both wait a time t2
While the receiver reads the bits, the sender is doing nothing. But they
should remain in sync, so either the receive time must be substracted from t2
or the sender must wait an amount of time equal to the receive time.
6.4 Control signals and collision detection
Are collisions possible? If there can be no collisions, collision detection
is not necessary.
Please let me know what you think of it. If anything is not clear or you
want it different, let me know.
What is most unclear to me, is why the design decisions are made. The timing
values, why are they chosen as they are? Why is the packet sent in 32-byte
chunks instead of 16-byte or 256-byte?
One thing you haven't addressed, is how the protocol handles broken network
links, like a
Z80 RISC VHDL model
Hi all, I can't remember where I got this URL from, but I certainly hope it wasn't from this list ^^;;; It's not free (although no prices are mentioned), but maybe this could be a really good solution for a new MSX: http://www.cyber-labo.co.jp/vmodel_en.html (look at the VLP80 model) Greetings, Patriek Problems? contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] See also http://www.faq.msxnet.org/
MSX Power Replay news
Hello MSX friends, We´re proud to present you a new fantastic collection for MSX lovers: MSX Covers Collection CD, a double CD with a full color cover, this collection contains cool scans from MSX games covers, some of then are very unknowed (like PAC cartridge of Panasoft), the images are in high definition format with all the details, there are scans of different versions of the same game (like Nemesis) and nice MP3 musics of original MSX games, you can get it trough MSX Power Replay: http://usuarios.meridian.es/replay Click on productos section and you will find more info in cdroms page. Thanks in advance, and remember: next MSX fair edition will be at 10th of March, 2001 - MadriSX. *** MSX Power Replay *** ** [EMAIL PROTECTED] ** http://usuarios.meridian.es/replay ICQ: 34051098 Problems? contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] See also http://www.faq.msxnet.org/
Re: (Joynet protocol)
I think we had this discussion before, but 32 bit CRC is overkill for small chunks of data. For example, MSX floppy uses 16 bit CRC for sectors (512 bytes long). A quick and interesting checksum algorithm is the one used for TCP/IP (one's complement of the sum of the one's complement of each word in the packet). Another interesting one is that used in PPP frames. There is an implementation (FCS - Fast Checksum S-i-dont-remember-what-this- letter-means) that uses a 512 bytes lookup table; the cost of the checksum is two XOR operations per byte and the resulting checksum is a constant for any packet (I don't remember the value by heart). If someone is interested, I can give a source code example. Adriano Camargo Rodrigues da Cunha ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Engenharia de Computacao - UNICAMP http://www.adrpage.cjb.net http://if.you.dont.like.msx.usuck.com * Press any key except... no, No, NO, NOT THAT ONE! * Problems? contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] See also http://www.faq.msxnet.org/
Re: MSX Power Replay news
Hello MSX friends, We´re proud to present you a new fantastic collection for MSX lovers: MSX Covers Collection CD, a double CD with a full color cover, this collection contains cool scans from MSX games covers, some of then are very unknowed (like PAC cartridge of Panasoft), the images are in high definition format with all the details, there are scans of different versions of the same game (like Nemesis) and nice MP3 musics of original MSX games, you can get it trough MSX Power Replay: Just wondering: did you scan all those yourself, or did you get a lot from FUNet? Best regards, Manuel --- PS: MSX 4 EVER! (Questions? See: http://www.faq.msxnet.org/) PPS: Visit my home page at http://bilderbeek.cjb.net/ Problems? contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] See also http://www.faq.msxnet.org/
Re: JUMP
Hi Bas, So, indeed, you started the discussion! :-) Anyway, I am not a good enough coder to make real comment here, so here is my lousy comment: - indeed as Maarten said: you forgot to introduce the term JUMP way, higher serial numbers will always be later versions of the document. This does not mean it is more up to date. An author can change an old document and add a new serial number. Anyway, let's get to the point. So if an author changes an old document and adds a new serial number, your whole system is useless. Maybe you should demand that the new document contains the serial number of the previous document the new one was based on? Best regards, Manuel --- PS: MSX 4 EVER! (Questions? See: http://www.faq.msxnet.org/) PPS: Visit my home page at http://bilderbeek.cjb.net/ Problems? contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] See also http://www.faq.msxnet.org/
