As most of us know MSX uses FAT12 (links to a nice explanation of the filesystem) as a file system as many other systems from the era. Nowadays we also have FAT16 support for mass storage. Both these filesystems represent the modification date’s year in 7 bits indicating the number of years after 1980. As 7 bits can count up to 127 the maximum representation of year is 2107. So we cannot have a file with a modification date in 2108. Some info about it is also on Wikipedia which mentions API functions only go up to 2099-12-31 (but no mention for what OS but it may apply to MSX-DOS as well).
I don’t really mind that fact and don’t care too much about modification times on my MSX media. However certain operations that use these modification date/time (especially in comparisons?) may fail and normal operation might cease because of it. Most of us won’t make it to 2108 but I kind of hope MSX surpasses us in a way that it is still usable.
Would DOS1/2/Nextor and the main DOS tools (UTILS folder) have issues with these dates? If not and now that there are still developers for MSX around what would be impacted and could we fix it in Nextor and possibly create patches for DOS1/2?
