C-BIOS - Developers wanted | MSX Resource Center

It has been a while since we reported about C-BIOS, the open source BIOS compatible with the MSX BIOS. BouKiChi initiated the development from this BIOS, writing it from scratch. The first version was released in August 2002. C-BIOS can be shipped with MSX emulators, so that without breaking any copyrights or trademarks emulators can be used out-of-the-box.

Although C-BIOS is already useful, it's far from finished. After talking to Reikan and BouKiChi, it was decided that Maarten ter Huurne would take over C-BIOS maintenance. The goal is to speed up C-BIOS development by getting more people involved. To organise this, a project at SourceForge was started.

Now, the C-BIOS team is looking for developers who like low-level assembly coding. Apart from that, testers are wanted who try running software with C-BIOS and report any incompatibilities they find. If you are interested in C-BIOS, please subscribe to the C-BIOS development mailing list.

Relevant link: C-BIOS at Sourceforge

By Manuel

Ascended (16850)

13-11-2014, 22:09

Ah, it's been 10 years ago! C-BIOS is still looking for developers!

By ARTRAG

Enlighted (6429)

14-11-2014, 08:36

The fact is that a new basic interpreter is not really needed for playing games and today we have better development tools than interpreters for new games and applications

By Manuel

Ascended (16850)

14-11-2014, 13:25

It's not only about creating a complete basic interpreter. Although some software have basic loaders (mostly European disk software).
And... there is no diskROM implementation yet either. That would be a great addition to C-BIOS! The you can suddenly run all these disk games (you know, Xak, Ys, all of these great Japanese disk games!).

Plus, there are probably some bugs in C-BIOS which could use more attention.

In other words: it's still very much worth wile to contribute to C-BIOS!

By hit9918

Prophet (2896)

15-11-2014, 09:00

I did some tests. In slot 1 put a cartridge "fixmapper", in slot 2 a game. The game doesn't launch.
The easy fix, when a cartridge returns, just continue cartridge search.
That message "cannot execute a BASIC ROM", nobody tried to run a BASIC ROM. Instead cbios gave up just because a cartridge returned.
Need to call more things. Like hooks.
When doing a cartridge to run after diskROMs I found these important:

;HOOK equ 0xFED0 ;HCLEA "file not open"
HOOK equ 0xFF3E ;HNEWS  called after HCLEA. not called by casette. autoexec works. type "new" on casette. used by network.
HOOK2 equ 0xFF07 ;HREAD  only upon "OK", not with autoexec.bas . called after HNEWS.

They happen in this order and it depends on the app which one you pick.
For example a gameROM that wants disk savestates. But even when it can work without a diskROM, it doesnt run on cbios because it is waiting for the hook.

Just 3 more call instructions added to cbios and a whole category of apps starts to work.
Going further this direction, "make the dummy calbas functions needed to make existing diskROMs install" is a hundred times less effort than making a free BASIC and a free diskROM.

Nobody will be moaning about a cbios motherboard missing a diskette drive, but the user will ask whether he can plug his nice ide sd nextor things.

And what cbios could do right now is BLOAD"cas:",r
A hand full of bytes of code and again another whole category can load.
Give the apps a chance to load!