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MMC/SD cardreader for MSX?

by snout on 09-01-2003, 11:01
Topic: Hardware
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ESE's Tsujikawa, who has been working on the one-chip design for MSX Association used his holidays to create a simple MMC cardreader for MSX. Also, experiments for using SD have succeeded.The current version connects to the joystick port of the MSX, making it a quite slow solution (about 1KB/s). The site also explains why MMC was used for the one-chip disign:

  • MMC is very cheap and easy to treat.
  • MMC uses a serial interface which reduces the ammount of FPGA pins used (contrary to CompactFlash and SmartMedia)
  • The current specification allows software hardware to be developed (contrary to SD and Memorystick)

Pictures are available on the ESE-PLD website

Comments (5)

By sunrise

Paragon (1090)

sunrise's picture

09-01-2003, 21:20

As perhaps many people know. Sunrise sells the CF after the idea of Ese. Development of separate cards for MMC/MEMORYstick/smartmedia as well as the new announced xd-picture of Fuji are unnecessary due to the fact that there are adapters available from pretec.
These adaptors are a lot cheaper.
Interested look at www.pretec.com and digital eyes.de.
A simple put in the CF-adaptor and cartridge from us is enough. Tested already, watch it if you like at OSS. We come also !!!!

By Google

By Grauw

Paragon (1797)

Grauw's picture

10-01-2003, 19:43

Maybe anyone would care to tell me what MMC is??? I know CF - Compact Flash, and SD - Secure Digital or something I think?? However MMC, I never heard of that. I suppose it's some other kind of FlashROM, but is it widely supported, etc...

By snout

Ambassador (13691)

snout's picture

10-01-2003, 19:45

MMC is Multi Media Card. Kind of predecessor of SD.

By cesarcardoso

Supporter (8)

cesarcardoso's picture

12-01-2003, 23:19

SD is becoming quite popular these days, thanks to Palm and Panasonic and a lot of other big guys.
It's good for the MSX that we can use all those Flash cards... hm, there's no MemoryStick and no SmartMedia reader Smile

By NYYRIKKI

Prophet (2771)

NYYRIKKI's picture

14-01-2003, 09:55

MMC is MultiMediaCard used by Nokia 9000 series and some video/digital cameras. I have few cards at home, so I'm pretty interested.

Does anyone know how to build this interface? Ready MMC -> CF adapter seems to cost about 25€ but how well it works with Sunrice IDE+CF adapter? Is it possible to read / write for example cards formatted to FAT16 in Nokia9110? Is MMC fast enough used this way in MSX?

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