Dumping/reverse engineering MSX models thread

I remember back in the time when I had my Al-Alamiah Sakhr MSX1 AX-170 one my MSX friends got Al-Alamiah Sakhr MSX2 AX350 - actually now I don't remember exactly weather it was AX-350 or AX-350II - and we were buying an Arabic monthly computer magazine issued from Lebanon. In that magazine you find lots of advertises for lots of computer systems like IBM, Amstrad, Commodore, ZX-Spectrum and MSX. He saw an advertising about cartridge copier called "Freeze Frame" for variant computer systems. He ordered the "MSX Freeze Frame" and used it to copy cartridges on disks or to cassettes.
The manual of the utility demands that a small plastic button hidden behind the slot 1 door should be broken in order to stop the computer from rebooting when the cartridge is inserted. Every slot of the two have that hidden plastic button. It also demands that the cartridge should be inserted by pressing on it from the right side first then the left side, to minimize the possibility of halting the computer. He used to successfully copy cartridges by doing the following steps:

1- He should start the computer without any cartridge in slots and with the utility disk in drive and the utility autostarts.
2- He carefully insert the cartridge into slot 1.
3- He chooses the destination device in which he wants to save the generated files, weather it is on a floppy disk or a cassette tape.
4- He type the filename to be saved.
5- The utility displays some kind of a table full of hexadecimal numbers!
6- He takes the manual and enter some hex numbers from the manual.
7- He waits for some time then the utility prints how the game should be loaded and executed* and it's done!

*After every copy, that utility gives him the proper loading method weather it is load "cas:", r or bload "cas:", r or run "cas:", r if it was copied on the cassette tape or load "filename", r or bload "filename", r or run "filename", r if it was copied on a floppy disk.

I am constantly searching the net for "Freeze Frame" but unfortunately could not find it till now. I don't know which company made it.

Note:
I think that the hex numbers he used to enter from the manual has something to do with telling that utility which memory-mapper to use in order to successfully copy the cartridge inserted.

Lame. sorry!

This is really pretty intriguing.

1) IDs greater than 127 are meant for devices, while IDs <=127 are meant for makers. But this machine doesn't seem to have any special hardware inside.

2) It could be the T7775 MSX-Engine, so maybe it has some special configuration options in the switched I/O ports. Have you run SWIOSCAN.BAS on any other machine that has this engine inside to check if they also return this ID?

I published a new version of the MSX machines reverse engineering utilities.

Changelog:
- DOSSCAN.COM was replaced by DSPEED.COM and DSPEEDW.COM. This are newer utilities that respectivelly measure read/write speed, and work fine on Nextor
- Replaced KANJIROM.BAS with a version by Manual Bilderbeek what fixed the CR/FL endings. It was also moved to the ROMDUMP folder

You can download it here.

My VG-8020/40 has the same ROMs as the 8020/20. You'll probably find the same.