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Description
The Beer 202 is an ATA/IDE/PATA interface. It is simple and cheap to make. It can support up to two hard disk drives or two CF cards.
Physical Drives will have to be powered externally, the cartridge does not supply enough power for them. Some low power devices like IDE Flash adapters or Compact Flash adapters may work without external power.
Beer 202 interface is a homebrew creation by Egor Voznesenski (SOLiD). Its BIOS does not contain MSX-DOS2 kernel extensions. BEER manages up to 4 (BIOS v.1.9) or 5 (BIOS v.1.8) drives and each partition can handle up to 32MB (32672KB). Latest BIOS is v.1.9. This release adds support for MS-DOS standard partition table in FAT16 and large disks. In return, only 4 partitions are supported. It does not support the MSX-DOS2 but it is possible to open the folders by using MF-DOS or MiSiX-DOS provided you have a Memory Mapper between 128Kb and 2Mb (La Beer does not support 4MB Memory Mapper).
From some people's feedback, it's best to use a PPI from National (ISN8255N), NEC (D8255AC-5), or Toshiba (TMP8225AP-5) to make a Beer.
You have to format the CF cards with SD formater, then to create the partitions with BEERIDE.EXE on Windows. (You have to install Visual Basic 5.0 Runtime and it works fine on Windows 10 32 and 64 bits if you set the Windows XP service pack 3 compatibility to BEERIDE.EXE. Tested up to Windows 10 20H2 64 bits)
Save Dump can be useful to create a disk image for OpenMSX. Just by renaming the "DMP" extension by "DSK".
When there are several partitions, boot partition is the last and transfer partition is the first. All partitions can be mounted under Windows 10.
We should be able to also create the partitions on MSX-DOS with HPREP.COM but this tools seems unfinished. Only fixing, formatting and deleting a partition seems to work properly. Let us know if you have a version that works well.
Another partition tool has also been written by Adriano da Cunha (A&L Software) for the version 1.8.
Using HPREP.COM
HPREP.COM is a command for MSX-DOS 1 which is used as below.
HPREP [flags] <parameter>
The available parameters are as follows.
hprep init
- Clean up the master boot records. (Delete all partitions)
hprep list
- List of all partitions
hprep boot <partition>
- Install boot partition
hprep fix <partition>
- Replacing the code in the bootsector with bootable MSXDOS
hprep format <partition>
- Formatting a partition
hprep delete <partition>
- Delete a partition
<partition> is the number of partition (1-4)
[flags] is not implemented (?)
Gallery
Circuit Diagrams
Links
- Detailed Beer IDE 202 information (Page mirror of Hansotten's site)
- msx.org news post about partitioning tool
- msx.org forum thread about BEER IDE
- Beer IDE review (Portugese)
- MSXFDD-S31 interface