Hi, please recomend what should I put on hard drive?

I have Sunrise IDE controller and a nice old 6GB hard drive with one 32mb and 3x2GB partitions.

Now that I figured out how to setup and use MSXDOS2 and IDE controller, I have a new problem: I don't know any software what is interesting and will work from hard drive...

Is there some sort of hard drive versions of Snatcher / SD Snatcher?
What about Metal Gear 1 / 2?
Other Konami and ASCII megaram games?

Does gens (assembler) work correctly on MSXDOS2 partition?
What about ASCII MSX C and HiSoft C?

Thanks,

Adrian

Most software that isn't drive protected can be put on harddisk using PUTDISK (to create an image) and START to start the disk.

I have SD-Snatcher, Aleste2, Big Strategy2 and lots more on HD and its no prob here.

You can use assembler from HD, Gen80 or M80 work great using a HD (imho it suxx using discs using these 2 compiler though).

Konami's in general can be run from HD, only if you have the disk version

If you are into graphics, the be sure to use AGE5 of Graphsaurus2 (there's a HD version of it out there somewhere).

One note though: some software will not work properly using MSXDOS2 sometimes. Try using MAP.COM (or MAP2.COM) before starting the software.

Ehm, "Big Strategy 2" won't work from harddisk with START.com....

hehe.. then I'm the first one to have a version that DOES!

AFAIK no Microcabins work with START, because they're mixed sector and file system based. Also they have a nasty copy protection

gen80 works very well in HD, i used to develop using it with MPW text editor and MSXDEBUG. Try Compass instead, this is a great ASM tool and works very well with IDE/HD. I recently buy a registered version and stay impress with the quality of the software. For dev purposes, HD is handy!

other thing i put on my HD is the entire msx1mania colection, works fine in 95% of the games

EVA videos is nice thing to put too (i don`t have any of this at this time, i`m a newbie in MSX-IDE world).

Quote:

AFAIK no Microcabins work with START, because they're mixed sector and file system based. Also they have a nasty copy protection

Like I said before: then I'm the first who does not have a copy protection on BS2

I wouldn't recommend only having 1 partition which is 32MB (therefore, FAT12). FAT16 (which is likely to be used on the other 3 partitions) is quite unstable, and only real MSX DOS disk access features work. There are certain programs that read sectors (for example CHKDSK.COM and IMPROVE.COM), which can't be used wisely on those partitions. I myself have a 4.3GB Western Digital HDD, which is divided as follows:

A:\ 32MB Boot partition
B:\ 32MB Own work partition / dev partition

That's all I regularly use. Then I've divided the rest of the partitions as follows:

2x FAT16 512MB for backup
32MB Games partition
32MB Music partition
32MB GFX partition (also for GFX9000)
32MB Demo partition
32MB Uzix partition
32MB Movies partition (which contains several GFX9K FLI movies, an EVA movie, etc).

Furthermore I have an 8 speed Hitachi CD-ROM device, which I usually use for playbacking EVA movies.

If I might add:
If you use all kinds of small files, then it is wiser to create a smaller partition then just 32mb. this has all got to do with the cluster size on the drive.

For Instance: if the HD has a partition of 32 MB, the cluster size (in most cases) is 16Kb. So, if you create a file of 1Kb. The file will consume 16Kb.

The same parition with a size of 16Mb should have a cluster size of 8Kb. So, a file of 1Kb should then take 8Kb.

But if you have a pretty large HD. Then that, in general, should not be a problem..

Nope... FDISK310 is smart enough not to give away all 32MB of a partition, so, the cluster size remains nice n small

Thanks.. Didn't know that!

When you say 'create new partition' (dunno the shortcut for that right now), and you input '32M' (for creating a 32MB-sized partition), it won't range from #0000 to #FFFF (which is exactly 32MB in 65536 clusters), but it will make its range in #0000 to #FF79. This way, the cluster size remains limited (yeah, those additional 32 clusters will double your clustersize! It's sad indeed ).

I don't really understand, yet. 32mb in 65536 clusters would mean 1 cluster is 2kb, right? But above, it states it's 8 kb or even 16kb?

Waaaa, wait. 32mb=32768kb. 65536 clusters would mean 1 cluster is 0,5kb. What's wrong here?

And 0,5kb = 512 bytes. Which is.......1 sector. But we were talking clusters....