I just bought a second hand msx2 (my GF's already addicted to Collumns, what a retrogamer!) and I succeeded in transfering .dsk files to my MSX using floppies...BUT most games come in the .ROM format used by most emulators...is there any way of using the ROMs on a regular (real) msx?

Thanks for helping me out.

Cheers.

There's a useful document on the internet called the MSX FAQ (hi manuel!). Detailed information on several file-formats, including .ROM can be found in this section

These Spanishe pages are also very interesting :

http://traposoft.papipapito.com/dominiopublico-romdsk.html

http://traposoft.papipapito.com/dominiopublico-waver20.html

Look for LOADROM.COM, a tool coded by Trunks that allows to load ROM files from MSX-DOS formatted floppies. It's really good for non MegaROMS. For MegaROMs, better look for disk conversions, or even better, order a MegaFlashROM SCC.

I programmed WAVeR, to convert MSX ROMs to WAVs, audio files to load using cassette input. It's useless if you have got a MSX2 with disk drive. But anyway, you can read about it in my pages http://www.robsy.net , under ROM Conversion Tools, and the documents are all written in english.

Kind regards,

Loading MegaROMs without specific hardware is almost always a hard task. Just as Pitpan said, LOADROM is a good choice if you have at least 256KB of mapped RAM.

To play 8KB, 16KB or 32KB, you should try the ROM2COM tool. It makes a MSX-DOS executable file of a original .ROM file.