Hello to everybody.
I just managed to get Spectravideo SVI-738 with Finnish manuals and original carrying case from a Finnish auction site.
While I was waiting for it to arrive I took a little view to various MSX related sites, hoping to find any good information about that specific MSX model, and I learned that it could be modded into an MSX2 machine.
So it arrived today and I cleaned the mainboard from any dust (it was a lot cleaner than I thought
) and tested DD floppy drive with it, and since it would work I´m planning to add it into it later after I get it to fit better. It seems that it is the model with 2 vram chips and 2 missing spaces. And there is empty space for Real time clock too.
Since it is in very good condition and pretty clean I decided not to waste the V9938 chip on only 16k of vram so I have a couple of questions for the gurus.
- I was not able to find the 64kb 4bit SRAM chips from anywhere but I found "64k x 4 120ns DIP18" labeled DRAM chips from Finnish electronics store so will they work too? I am going to solder the "holders" for chips, or whatever they are called, first since I am not very skilled with soldering.
- The old DD floppy drive I found before worked fine (placed switches to 0 and RY positions) so I´m going to just put it in after I make something to hold it, but will it be able to read DD floppies too well? (I mean that when I tested with SD floppy it worked but is there something with bios or something that works as a bottleneck?)
The last thing is that if I would like to make it into full MSX2 would MSX2 roms from any broken MSX2 work fine or do I need some sort of hacked roms since I have Scandinavian keyboard layout?
I know there are couple of Finnish MSX gurus out there so there might be some sort of "MSX2+SCN keyboard" solution..
Sorry for my bad English, when it comes to technical related terms it just goes "what the heck is that called in English?"
And of course I can send pic of the mainboard if it is needed.
-Mirsku
