Two friends of mine are currently working on a USB device that enables you to connect your MSX directly to the harddisk of the PC. When you use this device, you can use MSX disk images that are stored on your harddisk directly on the MSX (they are indicated as extra drives). It will also be possible to use your MSX disk drive directly from your PC, which enables you to create disk images using the MSX disk drive (which could be very nice in case your PC is not equipped with a disk drive).

Also, they are thinking about implementing an extra option: a FlashROM. With this, the cartridge that is to be inserted in the MSX contains FlashROM (e.g. 32 MB), on which you can install the disk images you use most (but of course you can change its contents via the PC).

The disk images on the PC harddisk can be used without any extra software, straightaway from BASIC.

They are wondering whether or not people will be interested in a device like this, so I thought: let's ask it at MRC . If all goes well, Jan or Aaldert will add the necessary technical details to this forumthread, so probably you will be able to read some more about this later on.

But now the question is: would you think you would be interested in buying a device like this? Of course we can't say much about the price yet, as the device is still in development stage.

Sounds cool Whether I would be interested in buying would, however, largely depend on the price...

Depends on what you're using it for.. when I'm composing on opl4 I use MSX and PC next to eachother. But without PC, some local storage of samples could be neat. The risk of using the PC for remote-storage is that you can become dependent on it. Not handy if you want to take your MSX to some clubday, without the PC.
Hmm.. anyway, I think it needs a longer think-over ^_^

(and atm I'm not the sharpest one orso )

I'm not the one to spam here, but you might want to check this ;-)

no news . since 2003 about it

@D-Tail: that news is about two years old now; did the Bitwise project die?

I'm afraid it died, yes. Although the website still states that Bitwise consists of 6 people, I have a feeling that I'm the only one left. I didn't hear from the hardware designers for months already. And as I have some degree of patience as well, I decided not to contact them anymore, it's their move now ;-)

Well, as you can read in my post, there are other hardware developers busy making such a device. But like I said, not much is decided upon yet. They made the device for fun and because they could use it for themselves while developing their MSX emulator (which is as unknown as this hardware project at the moment, but this is likely to change somewhere in the near future as well ).

@ Rikusu, Let they do the job, I'm really interest.

Very nice!!!

I hope this project will finish!

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Very nice!!

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I hope this project will finish!

I agree with you guys I´d be interested on it too

Keep the good work up!

Salu2.

I have waited quite a long for this kind of device to appear. I really hope this project will finish!

I also hope, that if you make it, you keep the programming interface free. I think there are many ways to use this kind of MSX cart <-> PC USB system. As MSX side needs disk ROM, I hope you'll implement it with flash just in case 1.0 is not perfect...

maybe a dumb question, but is there a restriction on the size of the harddisk it can read from? Or does it work with FAT16 or some other work-around?

It does sound like an interesting concept. If it works well I'm really interested.

How the Bitwise-prototype was implemented: simply a cartridge with a disk-ROM in it. A USB-cable connects it to a (windows) PC, on which drivers are installed for proper functioning. You select a disk image to be used in the MSX using the drivers, and from that moment onwards, the MSX will act as if that particular disk was inserted. If I'm not mistaken you could also do a 'Dir as disk' option (like openMSX utilises) -- you assign a folder on your HDD, and the USB disk interface will act as a harddrive interface with that particular folder as its root. See for more details this flyer. I recall having a complete description form (Dutch & English) about this interface, but forgot where I left it... :\