1. I make games for ZX Spectrum, especially for ATM Turbo 2+ (16 colors per pixel mode). How can I port them to MSX? What should I know and what should I have to do that? What emulator and what toolkit are most suitable for that? Can I write loaders in BASIC?

2. Is anybody going to port SymbOS onto ATM Turbo 2+?

I'm not forums freak, please answer me to e-mail alone_coder % mail dot ru.

I'm not such a mail.ru freak:
1) port to MSX: depends on the details of the graphics chip of that ATM Turbo 2+. If you have 16 independent colours per pixel, you should use MSX2. This means you have to adjust your code in such way that you program the V9938 instead of your ATM Turbo 2+ graphics chip. There is lots of documentation about it, e.g. on map.tni.nl
2) the most accurate emulators are blueMSX and openMSX (I use the latter for several reasons).
3) sure, you can write loaders in basic. MSX-BASIC is very powerful, so it should be easy.
4) this is an MSX forum, not a SymbOS/ZX forum. I think hardly anyone on this forum ever heard about ATM Turbo 2+, to be honest.

But better to write a com file instead. Basic loaders are so 1985

Teagan Presley is also very 1985 and I don't mind her.

I sent a mail

Alone Coder...... isn't he the guy that made wolfenstein 2004 for ZX?

Quote:

Alone Coder...... isn't he the guy that made wolfenstein 2004 for ZX?

He is THE MAN who wrote, and still writes, Pro Tracker 3 for Spectrum.

Quote:

Quote: Alone Coder...... isn't he the guy that made wolfenstein 2004 for ZX? He is THE MAN who wrote, and still writes, Pro Tracker 3 for Spectrum.

Perhaps a spectrum version of symbos would be a good idea. I believe Prodatron has said only the +3 has the relevant memory banking tricks, but it would be fun to open symbos up to such a large user base as the speccy. Plus what's this 16 colours per pixel stuff he mentioned, I don't recall any spectrum other than the Sam having anything like a proper bitmap mode. Even at 256x192 symbos would look good, as we've seen on the msx lower res screen

A couple of the Russian clone machines had some REALLY advanced features. Russia, as a rather poor country still had people using 8-bitters as primary machines. A heavily souped up Spectrum clone (such as the ATM series) can be sold for under 200 euros and will include features such as large RAMs (1MB is not uncommon), IDE support and more. This is really a factor when you can't afford something newer.

That said, it would be rather silly to code a SymbOS port for one of these Eastern European clones, as their numbers are quite small. Also, Prodatron has his hands full maintaining and improving the "core" versions of SymbOS for the CPC and MSX. I would suggest either speeding up the open-sourcing process and seeing if the Spectrum community has any interest in doing it themselves OR contacting some noted member of the Spectrum scene and offering them a chance to do the port themselves.

Oh didn't realise it was a russian clone. But still if symbos could run on a +3 it perhaps it will happen one day. As you say when it goes open source.

SymbOS needs too much memory + unsupported banking capabilities for a normal Spectrum.
But the ATM turbo seems to be a cool machine:...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATM_Turbo
But sorry, it's a little bit off-topic

damn, that ATM_turbo could be family to MSX Turbo R, gheh. (check them specs on wiki, it's funny)

Quote:

Russia, as a rather poor country still had people using 8-bitters as primary machines.

We not so poor Most of that peoples is just enthusiasts of ZX (or other platforms), as many of peoples on this forum is enthusiasts of MSX. ZX was very popular in Russia until ~1995-1997, later PC's spreads widely. I don't know any peoples, who now use only ZX - most of ZX users also have PC.

ATM2 does not have 'videochip', i.e. 'VDP with VRAM, connected thru I/O ports'. There is some raster modes, with video memory as part of main RAM. No hardware sprites, no fast blocks transfers, etc. But ATM not just ZX clone, it's have 1mb RAM, and banking capabilites is extended - four 16K segments in address space, any 16K memory page can be attached in any segment.

I'm sure, AlCo can port any of his ATM games to MSX, he just need good tech docs and information about MSX - not only I/O and memory map, but also info (links to documents) about MSX-DOS, filesystem, 'executable' structure, how game code must be placed in RAM (or how MSX-DOS and other system things use RAM), and so on.

Some notes:

- Why i say all that instead of AlCo hisself? He live in small city, there is problems with internet availability. But we often communicate thru e-mail and other ways, because we often work on some projects together (all ATM games for example). And i don't have problems with internet.

- AlCo have old and slow PC, so he can't use openMSX (it's work with fps<10).

- I have two Daewoo MSX (cpc300, cpc400s), so goes a question - can we test projects on this machines? What there problems with specific memory layout, compared to standart MSX2?

- We simple russian guys, we badly know English, and rare speak on it (i write this post with dictionary, autotranslator, and my poor english lexicon. So AlCo did not wish to offend anybody with words 'forums freak'.

Hey man, it's OK

Anyway, some general remarks:
- many technical docs can be found on MAP: http://map.tni.nl
- memory map: each MSX2 with mapper can have it in a different slot. Compatible programs find out where the mapper is (in which slot) and then use it. Even more compatible is using the MSX-DOS2 routines to handle memory management. The memory mapper itself is just a thing with 16kB RAM blocks that can be switched in any of the 4 16kB pages in the Z80 memory space
- the filesystem of MSX-DOS is just FAT12. (AFAIK there are no real differences.)
- executable structure: depending if you make a DOS or BASIC loadable program, it's only a header you need to think about. The rest is Z80.
- openMSX should be able to run on old PC's. Please check the performance tuning section in the manual and make sure you use the latest version. E.g. on a 200MHz PC it should work, if you use minimal settings. Contact us on IRC if you need help: #openMSX on irc.freenode.net
- You can test on Daewoo machines, but be careful that the slot in which RAM is located is not the same for every machine. Especially for Daewoo machines this is important, as they have the mapper in slot 0. If you use standard routines from the BIOS to get info, you should be OK.
- Your English is OK! At least good enough to communicate clearly, I think Keep in touch!

Thank for answers.

Report about progress:

By our tradition, which have developed last years, Alone Coder came in Moscow (where I live) in first days of January, to work together on any project (in previous years it was games for ATM). As this time we had no plans for any ZX-game projects, we have decide to concentrate on porting of our ATM game Ball Quest (2st place in Combined Game Compo on Chaos Construction 2006 demoparty) to MSX2 platform. This time 99% of work were made by AlCo, I mainly just looked and distracted AlCo with extraneous questions

For testing we used openMSX and blueMSX, and real Daewoo CPC400 (where we tested all important hardware-related things).

For this time (2-7 Jan) main part of game was ported to MSX2, and almost works. Its now have some graphical problems, but these will be solved soon. Preliminary i can tell that game works better than on ATM, i.e. faster - I think, 20 or more fps, compare it to 10+ on standart ATM (it was hard to play with such framerate). Game not used tile-based modes and hardware sprites, and work in G4 mode instead (because it hard to change program for tile-based mode). Game now work with 64KB RAM and 64KB VRAM. We also plan to change all music, because original music has been written for Turbo-Sound add-on (2xPSG soundcard), and its be too hard to remade it for standart AY (anyway, music was not original, just covers from some console games).

Today AlCo returns to his city, and there will finish porting process in near future (possibly in January).

Fun fact: instead of using cross-assemblers, AlCo decided to use Alasm - one of russian ZX Spectrum assemblers, running in emulator (because he don't have experience with cross-asm, but he have many exp with Alasm). Thus, possibly this game will be first project, developed for MSX on ZX Spectrum