Nextor: the whole story

Now that Nextor reached the second alpha and is somewhat usable I wanted to tell all of you the whole story behind its (yet unfinished) development. I have kept it as a secret until now but I think it does not make sense anymore.

Let's go back to April 2008. I was in Japan and one I received a mail from a japanese man named Shiozawa (yes, that Shiozawa) that was the MSX Association representative for Europe at that time. He was planning a trip to somewhere in Europe (I don't remember) and he wanted to see me. For some cosmological coincidence I was in Japan at that time, and very close to where he was (about half an hour by train), so we met the next day in the restaurant of my father-in-law in Osaka instead.

Aside from telling me a terrific story about the soap opera-style relations between MSX-A and the european users, he wanted me to be something like the representative of MSX users in Spain. I declined because that implied to travel to the Netherlands for a meeting once a year and I was not able to afford it, for my familiar and economical circumstances.

We kept contact via Skype for some time anyway. And one day, while chatting with him, I don't remember what we were speaking about but he mentioned "the MSX-DOS 2.50 project".

So I was like... wait. What? WHAT???

He told me that indeed, a project for a new MSX-DOS version was work in progress. And what was the development based on? Quite reasonably, it was based on the MSX-DOS 2.31 source code.

Of course I asked him who I had to kill in order to join the project. He redirected me to GuyveR800, the project leader in Europe (I think), who in turn asked someone else in Japan, and I was approved in the project.

So yes, I have the full source of MSX-DOS 2.31, including MSXDOS2.SYS. And that's what the Nextor development is based on.

And why I started my own project, you may ask? Because in three years I haven't received a project plan, a roadmap, a work schedule... NOTHING. I don't even know what were the planned features for MSX-DOS 2.50. I think that the project is pretty much dead. Anyway, the only modifications the sources I received had relative to version 2.31 were the FAT16 support (and apparently incomplete, I had to modify a couple of things to make it work) and some small optimizations scattered through all the source files.

Those of you who know me good enough will understand that by no means could I stay with this material in my computer and with my arms folded. So I decided to start my own MSX-DOS expansion project. It is not that I have been working on it for three years. Rather, it has been an intermittent work (for example, I stopped when I received my Denyonet prototype, in order to develop some software for it together with the TCP/IP specification).

I know that I should credit the MSX-DOS copyright owners in the Nextor documentation, but I really don't know who they are nowadays. The same goes for the FAT16 code (altough it seems to be the code made by Okei). I have asked Yokoi Hidekatsu via email but haven't got any reply.

And that's the full story, and also the reason why I will not publish the full source code of Nextor unless the original MSX-DOS source code is officially published some day.