Hi,

today I released SymbOS 1.0 ( http://www.symbos.de ), which means, that the Amstrad CPC part of this project is more or less finished :-)
So I would like to start with the MSX port. I saw the TurboR on a (kind of) exhibition during the last weekend (VCFe), and I really liked it.
I will try to get my own MSX2 up and running and will also play around with the two emulators I have.
When I feel, that I am ready to start, I would like to open a new thread in this forum.

I would be glad for any support:
- low level screen routines (plot texts/graphics/lines/boxes, scroll screen area, save/load screen area)
- low level FDC and IDE routines (sector read/write)
- several other low level device routines
- general support

But I should document my exact needs first. This is, what I will do now during the next days...

CU,
Prodatron

Good news!

I'll be interesting to see how easy (or hard) porting this will be.

Yay!

Like said, I'll help you as much as I can with graphics-routines and such. I don't know anything about low-level disk I/O (I always use the BDOS), but I'm sure there are people that can help with that as well. Other devices I can think of for now are the PSG, and perhaps the keyboard and other input devices. It shouldn't be too hard to figure those out either, so that's good too. That leaves general support, and for that I'll be cheering you on together with my duracel bunny! Unless that's not what you meant?

Wow! Looks like it's really going to happen. As for FDC/IDE routines... I think the openMSX or blueMSX team can help you out quite a lot, especially Alex Wulms - who wrote fastcopy - can probably explain you a lot about how stuff works. Of course, feel free to start a fresh thread and ask for help on anything that you might need help on . I for one am looking forward to seeing the first beta release!

Yep!, great news indeed!. I'm eager to see what can be done with an MSX under SymbOS!

Prodatron, send me an email when you are ready. I have a number of high optimized asm routines for vdp (command) management.

Quote:

Wow! Looks like it's really going to happen. As for FDC/IDE routines... I think the openMSX or blueMSX team can help you out quite a lot, especially Alex Wulms - who wrote fastcopy - can probably explain you a lot about how stuff works. Of course, feel free to start a fresh thread and ask for help on anything that you might need help on . I for one am looking forward to seeing the first beta release!

Working with disks, be it floppy or hard disks requires a tough decision: stay with MSX standards or write a separate driver for each fdc. The fist option requires the use of the diskrom interface (see my site for examples of diskrom sources and documents) like MSX Basic and MSX DOS 1 and 2 do. The second gives more freedom but you have to get to know the many MSX fdc's in existance.
Alex Wulms went for the second method because he wanted to do things the diskrom did not provide for. Fastcopy is thefore powerfull but restricted to not so many diskcontrollers.

AFAIK symbOS does 'simple' things such as Sector Read/Sector Write/Format. That's probably all it needs to do, in which case using the Disk ROM would be a lot easier. The only thing I don't know is how well Disk ROM calls will work without any of the BIOS variables present. Anyone?

The only problem I see is that the current Disk ROMs are very bad for multitasking. If you want to have that smooth, you'll have to write your own drivers that play nice with the system. And this is not a shell, but a completely different OS. Violating MSX standards is a given.

If there are too many different FDCs I will need to make the low level FDC routines (motor on/off, track seek, sector read/write) as a loadable module. So that everyone could write/use his own version, if needed. I think the individual code is very short . As far as I remember on the CPC it is about 1,0-1,5KB.

There are a few indeed, of which at least the two most common ones you'd want to support by default. I guess maybe using a module would be the way to go indeed. I'll try and see if I can find some info on these darn things, but I think it's not that easy to find anything other than the application manual thingies.

... or the blueMSX/openMSX source codes

About FDC: the best stuff is indeed Alex Wulm's commented source code of his drivers for FastCopy. The C-BIOS team has it, but it's best to contact Alex directly.

Good news about Symbos Hope that it will be as good as CPC version. For me one of the most important MSX projects in years