I've just bought a MMC/SD drive from sinfox.
I inserted it to my diskless Yamaha MSX2 YIS503IIIR with 128K RAM and 128K VRAM, removed the networking module (I don't use it at the moment and it can prevent a lot of software from running), put the 1G SD card into the drive and started playing with that thing.
I will speak about my first impressions, and I'd like other owners of this drive to fix me if you see anything I misunderstood or if I lack any bits of knowledge in the described scenarios.
It's a great peace of hardware, but it's first time I was exposed to DOS2 tools, big partitions, rom loading tools etc.
Drives and partitions
First of all, I read the instruction and initialized the card with INSTALL.BAT. I got a 22M partition, and a lot of unpartitioned space (1G minus 22M).
Later I discovered that DISKMAN.COM tool can add new partitions, 360K to 22M in size, one of which I can choose to be mapped as A: drive. All these additional partitions (up to 256M in total, as diskman tool permits, so I still cannot use the whole card) are not visible if I insert SD card into PC, and can be accessed only via DiskMan.exe tool.
DiskMan.exe (Windows tool) can choose disk image, create a partition for it on a card and copy the image into the card.
The last added disk image becomes the active one, but the tool won't let you select the active partition by it's number.
DISKMAN.COM tool on MSX can create new partition for a disk image, but cannot copy the image into the partition (how can I do that on MSX ?). The advantage of DISKMAN.COM over DiskMan.exe is the ability to select the active partition.
After mapping a partition with disk image to A:, if you have there software that autostarts on boot, you may loose ability to boot into DOS on your system partition again. In this case I eject the card - this reboots into built-in flash drive, then re-insert the card and run UTILS\XCHGMMC.COM to map A:,B: and C: back to the card, and then run DISKMAN.COM to map system partition to A: . All this sequence seems too long IMHO, am I doing anything wrong ?
If I will have a big number of disk images placed as partitions on a card, this switching may become a pain in the butt.
Running software.
Floppy images:
The only way I discovered is, as I wrote above, use DiskMan.exe Windows to create a image-sized partition and put disk image into it.
Small ROMs:
I couldn't make the built-in on the flash drive ROMLOAD.COM tool to run anything, even smallest ROMs.
I downloaded EXECROM and it worked OK.
MegaROMs:
it seems there is no tool that can use the cartidge's mapping abilities to run a MegaROM.
The only way I found is to use a cracked versions - COM for DOS or sets of BIN files for Basic.
Here comes my lack of knowledge in DOS2.
I tried to use some games that on regular MSX with floppy drive (and DOS1) required to press CTRL at boot time to be able to run them. With DOS2 and CTRL pressed they don't want to run (why ?)
I had to press SHIFT to disable DOS2 and other drives to run the games, but this means I have to put each game on it's own DOS1 image/partition and activate with DISKMAN.COM each time I need them, and switch to system or other partition after usage. Not too convenient IMHO.
The question is: what am I doing wrong with MegaROMs ? Is there a more convenient way of usage ?
I thought I can put them all on a single (or a couple of) 22M partitions and just run the one I need, without all that partition switching.
Can I use partitions >720K with DOS1 ?
Any help is welcome.
Please share your usage patterns of this device, and what else can I do with it.
My next step will be SymbOS installation.
