Hi hardware experts! I need someone that have the skills to think about this.
It is not about MSX hardware but it is about CPC hardware. The thing is, in the MSX world we have a lot of nice cool hardware, like the DenyoNet, GFX9000, MP3 player, etc. which is not available on the CPC world so far. I think this is because less people are having the hardware skills in the CPC scene. I was just wondering what would it be cool to have the possibly to extent MSX hardware to the CPC world by making some kind of hardware slot adapter for the CPC computer.
I’m only talking about I/O based hardware. As the main difference is that the MSX is slot based and the CPC is RAM/ROM based, but for I/O based hardware that is not needed as it is pure I/O communication.
I wonder how difficult it would be to make such an adapter where you can put your MSX I/O based hardware in it. This adapter must power on the cartridge and give the cartridge the ‘feeling’ that it is inside a MSX computer and then there must be a way to communicate with the cartridge on I/O based way from the CPC computer.
If this is possible then the CPC will have a big benefit as it could use then MSX based hardware. The cool thing is that then more people can really use MSX hardware and therefor maybe hardware projects are more profitable and maybe more people will buy it. Other thing is that for example with SymbOS (as SymbOS is already platform in depended) more specific hardware applications can be created and that would be a benefit for all users.
I’m sure Prodatron will make a SymbOS GFX9000 version for CPC with network support if this would be possible. And that would be cool.. As a new apps created for SymbOS on the CPC can be used on the MSX as well!
As told I know nothing about hardware but does anymore think that would be possible. If you look to the layout of the PINs? Maybe this is very simple to create.
