Hello,

i have a monitor arcade, and i want run mess with floppy disks, but i'm not sure
mess runs .dsk, but .rom runs with no problem, exists any converter ?

thanks all!

no

Heh.. that must be the shortest answer ever. Indeed, DSK and ROM are two entirely different things. You can't just get a DSK file, do some magic with it and then end up with a ROM file. Neither will it work the other way around. (Although you can use a ROMloader and run .ROM file from disks).

I suggest you use another emulator loke BlueMSX, NLMSX or openMSX to get those DSKs working. If you want to use MESS (and as you are running a 'monitor arcade'), I assume you will... contact the developers of MESS and let them know you'd like to see improved FDD emulation.

in theory, it's possible. You could capture the BDOS calls and instead of reading from disk, your read everything from the virtual disk on the ROM. So you could convert a 720kB disk to a 1MB ROM in theory, but it might not work will all the game since you don't know anything about the memory usage of the games.

an easier solution is to install an MSX emulator such as NLMSX, openMSX or blueMSX, or get a real MSX

Getting DSK to ROMs will also give some problems when you'd want to save something

of course something could be done like having a certain key pressed during 'disk' access to access a real disk.

The problem psakhis (and a bunch of other potential MESS users) is having is the fact that it's very hard to get DSK images working in MESS.

Yeah but he's not asking how to get dsk's to work in MESS, but how to convert them Since there is no dsk->rom convert I suggest to use another emu.

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Getting DSK to ROMs will also give some problems when you'd want to save something

Not only that, but what about the problem of RAM variables Disk games run from RAM, so variables are all over the place. Coding for ROM is very different.
It's impossible.

As a matter of fact, KOEI 8Mbit ROMs are disk images embedded into the ROM with a patched BDOS allocated on page 0.

If you take a look with a HEX editor you will see even the boot sector of the disk.

Furthermore, I've converted some DSK games to ROM without patching or editing the original DSK game. The only thing i made was creating a fake diskrom with sector-to-rompage conversion routines and a fake environment.

How exactly does THAT works?
It would be really cool to run some disk programs as ROMS, and much faster also =D

Moreover, ROMs don't break down that soon (as with floppy disks), plus a ROM has just a little bit more 'feeling' . Personally I think games on ROM are way cooler than disk versions

I think it is possible. I made a ROM of "La Abadia del Crimen", and this games is made of a BASIC loader and several .bin files.

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Not only that, but what about the problem of RAM variables Disk games run from RAM, so variables are all over the place. Coding for ROM is very different. It's impossible.

The "trick" here is not executing the game from ROM, but loading to RAM

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The "trick" here is not executing the game from ROM, but loading to RAM

When I said "It's impossible" I referred to a convertor program.
Ofcourse it's possible for small games to load in RAM. Hell, if you have 1MB RAM you can load an entire 720kB disk in there.
There are lots of ways of getting programs on ROM. There's just not a way that works on all programs, hence you need a deep understanding of programming and MSX architecture. My impression of the OP is that he does not have that knowledge, so discussing it is pointless.

I used a "convertor program". I just created a ESE-ROM Disk (installed the kernel, patched it, copy the files and I have the working ROM) So I didn't wanted to mean that I upload the whole game to RAM, just loaded it in files when needed (as it were loading from a real disk)

You are right it more difficult to do the same with a full DSK image, but it is still possible (using modified MegaSCSI utils). Okei made a *similar* (I said similar) thing executing DSK images from compact flash.

Anyway, I agree there is NOT an utility right now (as far as I know) that converts a DSK into a working ROM.