MSX noob questions:

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

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29-12-2009, 04:55

I've been tinkering with PC88 and PC98 for awhile, but am very unfamiliar with MSX in general, I'm a big falcom game collector and have a dozen+ MSX/MSX2/MSX2+ games I've never had a chance to play.

Recently I took the opportunity to find a MSX here in the US, and found one for sale(Sanyo Wavy23).

What I did notice is a lot of MSX systems only have cartridge/cassette slots, where all the gamI've been tinkering with PC88 and PC98 for awhile, but am very unfamiliar with MSX in general, I'm a big falcom game collector and have a dozen+ MSX/MSX2/MSX2+ games I've never had a chance to play.

Recently I took the opportunity to find a MSX here in the US, and found one for sale(Sanyo Wavy23).

What I did notice is a lot of MSX systems only have cartridge/cassette slots, where all the games I own are almost universally 3.5 floppies.

So my question is mainly in regards to that, will any 3.5 floppy drive work? IDE, SCSI? What's the default.

Do I need anything specific to the MSX to connect it?(add-on carts, etc for IDE? I know you need one for SCSI).

Any particular model/brand that is recommended for comparability?

Etc, essentially I just want to know what I need to play all my 3.5 floppy games on it before I commit to purchasing it.

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By RetroTechie

Paragon (1563)

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29-12-2009, 07:53

What I did notice is a lot of MSX systems only have cartridge/cassette slots,
Ehm, no... cartridge slots only, cassettes are loaded into an external tape recorder.

MSX floppy drives were introduced halfway between MSX1 and MSX2. Therefore no MSX1 models have a built-in floppy drive, but most MSX2, MSX2+ and ofcourse the Turbo-R do. There exist interfaces that let you add a floppy drive to an MSX that doesn't have one.

The standard MSX floppy is of the 3.5" double density type (single or double sided, 9 sectors/track, 80 tracks -> 360/720K), the same drive type used in Amiga's and Atari ST's. Also ordinary 1.44M PC floppy drives can serve as replacement. Usually this involves some re-wiring, changing drive jumpers etc, depending on MSX/interface and floppy drive type. And yes you can hook up a 2.88M IDE floppy drive to an MSX IDE interface, but well... hard to find, impractical, nobody does that.

essentially I just want to know what I need to play all my 3.5 floppy games on it before I commit to purchasing it.
By far the easiest way is to get an MSX2 (or 2+ / Turbo-R) with at least 128K main RAM and a built-in, working, double sided (720K) floppy drive. An external floppy drive is possible, but many of these are single sided (360K), and it takes up a cartridge slot.

Or get rid of floppies altogether: use a PC floppy drive to turn them into disk images, find some sort of MSX flash interface (eg. SD card interface or Sunrise CompactFlash ATA-IDE), and run floppy emulation on that. Or run the disk images on a PC emulator... Tongue

By Eugeny_Brychkov

Paragon (1232)

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06-01-2010, 19:13

I would add to Alwin's advice for you to make images of diskettes anyway - just for the case if diskettes will get damaged during your tests or just to try them in emulator to see if and how well they work. There're various tools, look for "dcopy" - the one I usually use.

BTW, Panasonic's CF3300 MSX1 has built in 720K floppy drive.