MSX Association wants to know what the MSX Community thinks of the USB cartridge reader plans. Please use this forum to discuss your opinion on the reader and on how things should be done. Results will be summarized and sent directly to the MSX Association.

Very nice idea, but unfortunatly not for me. Simply because i have not that many (Not 1) ROM game! Besides, the games that are on ROM that i would like to play, such as MG2, are too rare and expensive.



If new ROMs will be made, i prefer to have them on flash memory instead. But that does not meet the original MSX standard.

I like this idea very much - I do own a lot of carts and would buy the reader ... but only if it will be supported on MacOS X ! (I really hope they will support Apple's Mac systems - also for MSX Player - I also believe MacOS has a very good market share in Japan - about 10%? - so they can't leave us out )

MSX Associatiion already announced a Macintosh version of MSXPLAYer. No date known as of yet though

sure, it needs support from al known (current) commercial platforms. Its a key (1 of the many) to success!

What wold be nice is that you can write to rom carts then so you can copy the old school roms to ROM cart and then play em on MSX... than i shure would buy one

Only these words 'hmm... nice...'



Sounds like a plan! With all the problems with the Turbo-R diskdrive I have lately, it would be great to just plug in the moonsound to the PC and use it from there

It sounds like a good idea and with the device from Padial (if I am correct) which is sold by Rinus Stoker of MSXInfo/TotallyChaos you would be able to use Flashcards as well.



Though I have not many cartridges, but I might buy one, depending on the price...

It sounds quite cool indeed. Ofcourse as a 'real' MSX user I would need to find a practical use for it before I will buy one, since I am not planning to use emulators on any short notice. But I fully agree with the plans, and think the reader is a good initiative and one step closer to the 'new MSX'.



~Grauw

I think it must be possible to use MSX I/O devices like MoonSound and MSX-AUDIO on it. It should be compatible with all MSX cartridge peripherals and not just game rompacks.

as far as I understood, the current design only supports MSX game ROMs. This means Moonsound, IDE etc. will not work. I'd like to know your opinion on this, and perhaps hardware developers can comment and suggest possible designs.

HI

I would rather see a pc connecting to the msx cartdridge slot via usb etc.
Many msx hardware is already emulated on the pc, can this not be interfaced to the msx?

Ex. emulate scc chip on pc whilst playing on real msx

etc.

JP

Quote:

as far as I understood, the current design only supports MSX game ROMs. This means Moonsound, IDE etc. will not work. I'd like to know your opinion on this, and perhaps hardware developers can comment and suggest possible designs.

That would be a shame. And I don't know if it would be really nessecary to support only memory. After all, the memory access and I/O access both use the same lines; the address bus and the data bus. The only difference is that while an I/O action is performed the IORQ pin is set while memory access uses the MERQ signal. Aside from that there is as far as I can understand no difference, so if memory is supported, it should in my eyes not be very difficult to support I/O aswell (which would be much cooler). Ofcourse it depends on the exact design of the USB-reader, but I don't think it would be very difficult. As I said, there isn't much difference between those transactions. Basically the same routines/logic could be used for it, with some subtle changes.

~Grauw

It brings nothing new...It does not fill any need.
...
If you consider it as a first step to get full USB supoort on real MSX , then why not ...
But it wiuld be better to go directly for a USB interface that enables to plug printer, modems, mouse , web cam , etc on a real MSX.

Leo - You're talking about the MSX USB interface.

The USB cartridge reader is intended for connection to non-MSX systems so that emulators can run ROM cartridges.

jpgrobler - I do not think ASCII will create a device that connects MSX to a PC to use the PC as (emulated) hardware. Face it, commercialy, the old MSX computers are not interesting anymore.