Carnivore / SofaRun / Running Games For Dummies

Alright then - I got a real CF card (4GB Transcend, TS4GCF133) and managed to format it and put Nextor + SofaRun on it from Win10. So that's sorted and it seems my SD to CF adapter was the reason for previous troubles.

Next headache: quite often after cold boot the CF card is not detected - either hangs at some point (after Carnivore's menu) or just boots to Basic.

Thanks for the tip, but it was enabled while the problem was occuring. It still is, though less frequently now. Sometimes I also get red border screen - but the OS/games work. Let's say for now I can live with it.

Now, about running games. I would like to understand how it all works on MSX, I mean, what the most common patterns and reasons for failure/success are.

Here are a few examples which have failed to start, on an unaltered setup (meaning I haven't changed any options in SofaRun or Carnivore, though the latter had been configured by the previous user)

MSX1 games
-Comet Tail [4128] - stops at SR loading screen, the one with OOO
-Congo Bongo (dsk) - blue screen
-Con-Dori (dsk) - "illegal function in Basic"
-Popeye (rom) - black screen
MSX2 games
-Barbarian The Duel (rom/dsk)- blue screen
-Arsene Lupin (couple of roms) - black screen

In several cases, if the desk is just containing files l, copy these files to a directory and just try to run the loader, e.g. autoexec.bas. You might want to run map.com before that.

Is Popeye an MSX ROM? Or is it the conversion?

Which Lupin game? There are several.

Barbarian is pretty large I think. What is the size?

You can use a PC tool to extract the files from the DSK image, and then copy them to a folder on your flash card.

Arsene Lupin the 3rd - Babiron no Ougon... runs fine on my Carnivore 2 on my turboR.

I use the following setting in SofaRun for all ROMs as a basis: No subslots: Yes
Which settings did you change to non-default?

Barbarian The Duel is 1MB indeed. And the Carniovore 2 configurable MegaRAM is also 1MB. I see that SofaRun is not using the C2 RAM for this game (maybe that's a mistake? Or does it need a bit of that RAM for something else as well?). Anyway, SofaRun is refusing to use the Carnivore 2 RAM for this 1MB game. Don't know what we can do about it, except asking Louthrax.

It runs fine if you let Sofarun load it in the "Carnivore 2 RAM". You should see that happening. Can you confirm?
That RAM is configurable to mimic almost any kind of MegaROM mapper. That's why most things work in it.