Hi everyone,
A few months ago Fubukimaru contacted me about MSXIRC. This is a neat IRC Client for MSX that Ptero programmed and made available here at MSX.ORG in download sections, but, unfortunately it was not working on the UNAPI adapter he was testing. I've tested on the SM-X WiFi and it didn't work either... Long history short, it worked fine for UNAPI on RAM but not UNAPI on ROM. Ptero was kind enough to provide the source code to Fubukimaru and allow it to be published, rewritten, etc...
So, this started as getting it to work on UNAPI adapters that have the UNAPI driver on a ROM, but in the end several little improvements were made, Fubukimaru helped me along the way on documentation and testing and suggestions, and now we release the 1.1 version of MSXIRC. It requires a MSX2, it requires a Memory Mapper with at least 2 segments available, (the more mapper segments available, more Windows can be opened at the same time). It is a quite cool and nice concept of User Interface designed by Ptero with small fixes and additions made by me which I think not only makes it compatible with all UNAPI adapters but also make it easier to use and friendlier!
Is it perfect? By no means, at this time I'm not being able to allocate time to hobbies, so we have a few known bugs already and some stuff we wanted to improve along the way that still is pending development... Those are left for MSXIRC 1.2 and 2021 (or, if someone also wants to make enhancements, contributions are welcome, source code at: https://github.com/Fubukimaru/msxirc). I've done my best to comment the inner works and reverse engineer the idea on the original source code by Ptero, but I did not finish all the code analysis/comments, so there might be some wrong assumptions or parts not commented.
This IRC client is very usable and works quite good on quite a few irc servers / channels :)
You can find it at MSX Hub:
https://msxhub.com/MSXIRC
hub install msxirc
Also, Fubukimaru has made a release on his github:
https://github.com/Fubukimaru/MSXIRC/releases/tag/1.1
Hope you all enjoy this enhanced version of MSXIRC, it was a pleasant surprise once I got to understand how it works and the neat ideas Ptero had for its interface, and I just hope you like it as much as we've liked it! ;)
