Home Page Forums MAME MAME Creating/running MSX dsks

Hi,

I've tracked down an MSX game I want to run. I've extracted a .bin file from the original .pma archive format and then created a .dsk image using DiskMgr V0.08, downloaded from the net.

The resultant .dsk can be successfully run in RuMSX, an MSX emulator.

When I try to use it in MS, I find that the msx.rom file I have does not seem to pass the checksum. The MSX machine won't therefore load. Is that to be expected?

If I, instead, try to load it into the MSX2 system, it boots the system but complains about a disk i/o error when I attempt to run the binary. Is this actually a problem with the disk image or is it the msx driver? I ask because it says at the very bottom of this page, that disk i/o errors might be reported for other errors:

http://www.mess.org/sysinfo/msx.htm

I'd be very grateful if anyone could shed some light on the use of the MSX systems as I'm a bit stuck now. Should I just be accepting that MESS can't yet handle the program I'm trying to run?

Sam.

Bad form to reply to one's own post but it doesn't look there's going to be much activity on this thread (!)

I have managed to find a .dsk image which does appear to load into the MSX2 driver. Somewhat surprisingly (for me, anyway), the MSX-DOS prompt complains with "Disk error reading drive A" when reading the image. However, if I tell it to retry twice in a row, it eventually runs the program. That seems somewhat weird!

Sam.

What program did you use to extract the .pma? I have some stuff in that format I haven't been able to use.

As for msx.rom, if the MSX driver complains but it works in MSX2, then it's a pretty good bet that's actually an MSX2 ROM :p

I think MSX requires a disk ROM too if you want to use the disk drive. Try getting a complete BIOS set from a MESS BIOS site.

Hi,

Yeah, the PMA archive did stump me for a while, but I'm quite persistent when I put my mind to it.

This page [http://www.faq.msxnet.org/suffix.html#PMA] proved most useful and led me to this command-line tool:

http://www.funet.fi/pub/msx/othersys/pmarc-pc.arj

I tried the PMEXT.COM tool first but it seemed to balk at the .pma I was playing with. The one above coped with it, tho. Hope that's of use.

As for the bios' - I downloaded all the msx related ones through geocities.com/messroms/ (and the site it links to). But when I run an "audit all systems" within mess, I get 12 failures, including msx.rom's checksum. I think it's because that site is only up to date with 0.81 mess bios roms. Can you recommend an alternative site where I can update my collection of bios'? If not on the message board, perhaps by email? I'd love to play with the original MSX as well as the MSX2!

Cheers,

Sam.

Ahah. Bad form, twice in the same thread (!)

Ack. But more persistence has turned up a link off geocities.com/messroms which points to an updated repository.

I'm off to play with MSX now ...

Sam.

Man, I'm talking to myself!

Sorry for this, but I got stuck with the disk.rom.

I have 3 or 4 different versions but none of them seem to load. Dropping out to the command line, I get:

C:\Progra~1\mess087b>mess msx -cart disk.rom
Driver reports load for cartridge device failed
Ensure image is valid and exists and (if needed) can be created
Unable to initialize machine emulation

C:\Progra~1\mess087b>

Looking at this bug report here:

http://bugzilla.mess.org/show_bug.cgi?id=460

and these pages here:

http://www.msxnet.org/mess/news
http://www.msx.org/forumtopic1487.html

they seem to suggest I need a disk.rom which is listed in msx.crc (where's this file??).

I can't seem to find such a disk.rom file in what I think is my complete bios.rom set (the only disk.rom is in the msx2.zip file and that doesn't work). Searching the archives, does come up with some discussion of this topic but nothing which has helped me work out where to start looking for a new disk ROM ...

Sam.

The msx.crc and all other crc files have been replaced with an xml type file about 6 months ago. Those can be found in the hash directory of mess. The msx.crc was converted to msx.hsi.

As for the rest of your problems, I don't know anything about MSX.

Ah, right. Thanks for that.

How can I check what the crc is of the files I'm trying to load?

Anyone any idea how I'd go about finding one listed in the .hsi (nee crc) file?

Sam.

Bingo! It turns out WinRAR shows the CRC of files if they're in a RAR or ZIP archive. From that, I was able to find a copy of disk.rom which works with MESS. It took a bit longer to work out how to get MESS to load it, but I eventually figured out double-clicking it in the GUI seems to do the trick ...

Anyway, I think I'm happy. Altho, I think the MSX2's speed actually feels better with what I'm playing with. Intriguing ...

Sam.

I think disk.rom just needs to be in the BIOS ZIP, i.e. not specified in the GUI or on the command-line, but then I haven't really used the MSX emulation. I just know it was a bitch getting the right disk.rom because they kept changing it every version

Hmm .. nope. Just putting it into msx.zip didn't work by itself, for me at least.

Once you have the disk.rom with the correct CRC (stored wherever), you need to go into the GUI's MSX Picker tab, hold down Ctrl and select the disk.rom and whatever .dsk you want to load (if the ROM is not listed - perhaps because you stored it in the bios directory - then you can go into the Device View tab and browse to insert it in the first cartridge slot, which should then make it show up in the Picker tab). Then, when you hit Enter - with .rom & .dsk selected - it boots the MSX with the ROM present (requiring you to input the date) and, if it's a bootable .dsk, boots from the disk. If it isn't bootable, it comes up with the BASIC prompt with an additional message indicating Disk BASIC 1.0 is present, allowing you to use the MSX's BASIC DOS commands.

I tried the same technique with a disk.rom with a different CRC and didn't have much luck. Once you can calculate the CRC of files, tho, it's not too hard to trawl the MSX sites to find the corresponding .rom suitable for use with MESS ....

Sam.

I haven't been successful to run any dsk-images at all :-(
When I try to use MSX2 or MSX2+ I often get some error message because some file couldn't be found or the system reboots.

When trying with the regular MSX and the disk.rom procedure above, I end up with the regular BASIC screen, but with the Disc Basic-message. Maybe all dsk-images I tried aren���t bootable? (should be surprised though) How can I give DOS-commands? I owned a SVI-738 Xpress once, but there I remember being in an MS DOS-like environment and not the regular BASIC editor.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Another thing... Are there any way to verify the dsk-images you have? Like e.g. the Good-tools that are available for many console rom���s.

Just read Bug 190 (Can't boot from floppy)
http://bugzilla.mess.org/show_bug.cgi?id=190

and noticed that all my dsk-images are 720k so that's maybe the problem.

Is someone working on the MSX-driver right now?

The TOSEC project (http://www.tosec.org/) is an excellant resource for the managment of home computer images (as well as some games consoles).

Doesn't that bug report say that 720K disk images DO work fine? The disk image for the MSX program I successfully ran was 720K. From my experience, it took a few attempts to find an image which would boot the MSX2 driver but it was fairly trivial to do it. Most of this thread was me trying to duplicate that same functionality in the MSX driver (which doesn't have disk capability right out of the box) - that required a specific disk.rom file which I had difficulties tracking down.

If that's of any use ...

Sam.

Thanks Cassiel. I've been following the emu-scene since '95 and I haven't stumbled upon TOSEC before. Strange ;->

Took some time to find out what to do on the site, but now I've dl TIM and sorted my dsk-images out...

You're absolutely right! And I think I even read it several times yesterday :bemused:
Ok, that makes it even stranger that I can't get any at all to work. Back to testing...

No sweat.

If you have any more questions/problems using TIM then post a message on the board. Everyone���s quite friendly there and I���m usually on it all day (well I will be again once the tosec.info mirror domain is back up ��� Gren if you���re reading!).