Hm, shit. I need to buy a Sunrise IDE card ASAP.

First of all, this is trully amazing! Congrats, Prodatron!!

Now, what I could see... I tried changing the colors to white/blue/gray (kinda windows scheme) and the best I could achieve was this... something bluesh/yellow.. couldnt by no way get gray values, even setting RGB to same values (like 5,5,5 or 3,3,3) - so I guess there is something wrong with the colors...



Also, I clicked on the clock, then clock windows showed up.
Then I clicked on the clock again (not closing the window) and I got *another* clock window. Is this supposed to work like this? Shouldnt it just put the "focus" on the already opened clock window?

Once again, keep the good work - if this runs .COM, .BAS and .BIN files, we could blow DOS2 away for good =)

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Some things/questions: - could someone help me with the stripes in the border? What I am doing wrong here? I can't see it in the emulator, so I just can guess here. Sonic_aka_T mentioned something with colour 3, but I didn't understand correctly. Which register/colour/etc. do I set in the wrong way? I think it should be VDP register 7, but bit4 is already 0.

Seems you fixed this. What I meant to say is that indeed you need to 'mirror' this color number to the highest 2 bits of the nybble.

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- so if I only support the biggest memory mapper available, I don't need to do anything, as DOS1 and DOS2 always uses it as the default? So if you have a MSX2 with 128K ram + an external memory mapper with 512K, DOS will use the 512K?

DOS1 doesn't really support (or unsupport) the mapper. DOS2 will however use both (or all?) mappers, meaning 640kB in your example. If I may add: 640kB ought to be enough for anybody!

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- regarding the screen corruptions in R800 mode: I am already waiting for the "ready for next command" state. Do I also have to wait, when I just write bytes directly into the VRAM? What I don't do is to wait for a "ready for next byte" state for CPU->VRAM commands.

The R800 usually shouldn't cause any VDP corruption, since it actually has to wait *longer* than the Z80 would when running the same code. I think the problem might be two 'write to VRAM' commands occuring 'at the same time', one thread perhaps interrupting another. This would occur more easily on R800 since it's so darn fast, everything (apart from VDP access) will probably run 5-6x faster than it would on a normal MSX2.

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Starting from this week I will go on with the FDD routines. I hope to receive my second MSX2 soon, this time with a working disc drive

Great to hear! I wish I could help, but I've never really handled the FDCs directly.

Prodatron: the best thing is to join our IRC channel in the evening: #openMSX on irc.freenode.net.
And thanks for the sources, I'll ask our IDE specialists to check them, if they haven't already done so after reading your post

I've been now testing symbos on emulator for few days and just came here to say: Gonguratulations to prodatron!!!
Symbos is truly amazing!

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karloch: what happens if you try to run those apps?

Nothing. They simply won't start, but it looks like the system is not affected. The exception is SymSee that will freeze the MSX, needing to reset it. The task manager register the apps that I have tried to load.

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Karloch: Do you use CF or Harddisk to boot from? If HD, what PIO mode it supports? (look boot screen)

I'm using CF IDE. SymbOS is located on the first FAT12 partition.

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I tried changing the colors to white/blue/gray (kinda windows scheme) and the best I could achieve was this...

It's a neat color scheme, good work SLotman!

Today I received my Philips VG8235 and tried to test SymbOS on it. First I was shocked, that Windows XP is not able to handle single sided FAT12 discs. So I formatted the disc on the MSX (in basic with CALL FORMAT), put it in my Amstrad CPC and copied the files COMMAND.COM and MSXDOS.SYS (MSX-DOS1) onto the disc. Unfortunately DOS1 is still not booting, I only see an empty screen. Does anyone have a hint, how I can creat a DOS1 360K disc? (sorry, the question is a little bit off-topic...)

@SLotman: Did you use BlueMSX? (screen shot looks like BlueMSX) Strange, in this emu I can create any grey I want in SymbOS.

Maybe CPC did something to boot sector? Try to boot without disk in drive. Put disk in drive and type FILES. If you can see the files on disk, try if you can start the DOS by following trick:
POKE &HF346,1:_SYSTEM

I can see the files, but it seems, that the MSX doesn't like to load files, which have been written with SymbOS before.
So I wonder, what the problem is:
- I write the "created" timestamp, too. Should this be zero for the MSX?
- Does the MSX use the second copy of the FAT? Currently SymbOS is only updating the first copy. TBH this is still a bug.

If you are hardware experienced, i suggest to modify the VG8235 to double side. This will solve a lot of problems.
Also, keep in mind that 360 K refers to only one side...

BTW, is there any need to run SymbOS from DOS ?
Can't it be just BLOADed ?

Well, actually, there is no need to run SymbOS from DOS as it a totally independent OS. So I think that there will be a loader soon.

Prodatron: if you want to format the disk and your MSX disk drive works, put simply CALL FORMAT and also, you can write it under windows, so you don't need to use your CPC for copying data.

Yours,

spl: the issue was, that Windows XP can't handle simple sided floppy disks -- Prodatron: better get your hands on a CF-IDE from Sunrise and try copying with that instead