I hope that I soon get OCM, but at the moment I'm a bit puzzled...

- What different hardware configurations are available at the moment?
- What you think is the best (MSX) hardware for OCM at the moment?
- Can someone tell in English what are the major differences? Chips included etc.
- How safe it is to change hardware? How likely it is to burn the Altera chip?
- Are there different programs for changeing the hardware?
- Can you freely upgrade and downgrade between hardware versions?

UP!

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- What different hardware configurations are available at the moment?

Sofar I've seen two releases on MRC, but I'm sure there are more. These are mainly mods of the original MSXA distro.

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- What you think is the best (MSX) hardware for OCM at the moment?

If you're talking about the soft-hardware, then I suppose they're all more or less the same. There's no mod which gives you a MoonSound or GFX9000 if that's what you mean.

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- Can someone tell in English what are the major differences? Chips included etc.

Like said, all are minor mods (improvements) of the original code. I haven't heard of any new chips being emulated.

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- How safe it is to change hardware? How likely it is to burn the Altera chip?

I shouldn't burn anything, but you may end up bricking the darn thing. In that case you'll need a cable to rewrite the FPGA.

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- Are there different programs for changeing the hardware?

I think so, but it already ships with Quartus.

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- Can you freely upgrade and downgrade between hardware versions?

Normally, yes, unless something goes wrong and ends up bricking your OCM.

NYYRIKKI

See all the documentation about the unnoficial but major improvements of the 1chipMSX code here:

http://www.webalice.it/gnogni/

Doc is included in the zip file. Many important problems have been now solved.

Regards,

Ok, thanks for the info...

It just seems that more I try to understand of OCM the more questions I get...

One thing that really puzzles me is that MSX-BIOS is not delivered on CD with the device

I can also read rumours about SYSTEM.HEX file that can be put to SD-card, but I can't find any information about the file structure.

It would be also nice to know how the original BIOS has been put in to the flash...

The .hex file is actually rather simple. It's an intel something hex format. You can find a description of it on the net. But you can basically create those with Quartus as well if you want to try and change the roms.

Supposedly you can place a 256K rom file as the first file on the SD card and it will read that instead of the one in the flash rom. I never got it to work properly, but you can check here for more info.

Ah, finally a link that has good information in English! Thank you, this is what I needed!

Now I actually think that the ROM's need to be in SD-card in binary format, not HEX-format... not sure though... have to try today...

Yes, I used hex2bin, modifyed the ROM and put it to MMC. Works like charm

WTF I just realized that they have used 128KB for KANJI-ROM, but there is no KANJI-BIOS present at all ... and this device has >20MB of totally unused memory... weird... really weird...

Someone with more knowledge, would it be hard or "expencive" to assign RAM from 06C0000-06DFFFF to slots 0-1 and 0-3 as ROM?

Don't know how easy/hard it is to use the extra RAM.

As far as I know, the device contains 32MB RAM because of cost/availability reason; smaller RAM chips are more expensive because they get produced/sold less (if they still get produced at all...)

Actually this is now already implemented by HRA. I think he does not sleep at all

I should contact him some day. I have some enhancements in mind that I want to start working on but I don't want too many branches to come into existence.