CPC-400 and Carnivore2

Supporter (8)

23-02-2023, 05:02

Hi all! I'm new to MSX so please bear with me. A few months ago a friend in South Korea helped me score a Daewoo CPC-400 in good condition, and after installing a Gotek internally I've been playing around with various software with varying success, and I recently got a Carnivore2 to try out cartridge software.

However, so far I've been unable to get it to work well with either of the 3 different kinds of CF cards I have handy. First of all, it throws a "failure" when initializing the IDE driver.

And secondly Nextor fdisk hangs immediately after launch (which I assume is related to the previous error). For a split second you can see the Nextor banner being printed, then it scrolls off screen and hangs at this state.

I've flashed the Carnivore2 with the latest firmware available at the time of writing: 01.05.2022

Before I go any further, I wanted to ask this community: Would you say the Carnivore2 IDE driver, and or Nextor fdisk software compatible with CPC-400 ROM v1.00? From reading up on this machine, it has known quirks (and probably some unknown ones too.) I have a programmer handy if there are good ROM upgrades that can be done on this machine!

ログイン/登録して投稿

By Wierzbowsky

Guardian (3648)

23-02-2023, 17:06

You need to flash the latest special Boot Menu v2.52. I assume that you have v2.50 firmware, right? Also, you may need the latest version of Nextor v2.1.1 with the fix for the Fdisk bug on Korean computers.

https://github.com/Konamiman/Nextor/issues/100

You need to download the below file, rename it to BIDECMFC.BIN and use the latest special version of C2MAN to write this file as IDE BIOS into your Carnivore2:
https://github.com/Konamiman/Nextor/releases/download/v2.1.1...

What CF cards do you use? Please post some pictures.

By penpal

Supporter (8)

24-02-2023, 05:25

Thanks for the advice! So it turns out it was a known issue. I've flashed 01.05.2022 release version of the Firmware from Github, which looking at the commit log does seem to map to Boot Menu v2.50. So it makes sense that the bug is affecting my MSX.

This is probably where my understanding is lacking, but I was under the impression that I have to prepare the CF card storage in order to be able to run C2MAN.COM which is what enables me to upgrade to Boot Menu v2.52. At least this is the sequence described in the manual. So it seems I'm in something of a chicken and egg situation.

Here are the three CF cards that I'm using! At least the 150x RiDATA card is listed in the compatibility matrix.

By sdsnatcher73

Enlighted (4288)

24-02-2023, 07:14

You can use C2MAN from a disk image with MSX-DOS from your Gotek. No need to boot from C2.

By penpal

Supporter (8)

24-02-2023, 07:59

Ah of course, that makes sense as a bootstrapping route. So I have a disk image now with MSX DOS 1.8, the latest C2MAN.COM plus the BIDECMFC.BIN (fixed IDE driver) and BOOTCMFC.BIN (Menu 2.52) files for flashing. The system boots and the files can be listed and interacted with.

Now my next hurdle is to boot the system from floppy when the cartridge is inserted. The system always boots from the C2 cartridge. I tried googling it but can't find a universal way to select the boot order. I tried hotplugging the cartridge after booting from floppy (seems like a bad idea) but when running c2man after this, it just sits there for a minute, loads some data from the gotek, and then quietly exits back out to the MSX DOS prompt.

I'm sure there's something basic I'm missing here...

By jepmsx

Champion (281)

24-02-2023, 11:20

Maybe you could create an entry in the menu activating only the SCC part or FM part and not the IDE controller

By penpal

Supporter (8)

24-02-2023, 18:09

The problem right now is that C2MAN either gets corrupted when I copy it, or isn't compatible with this system. And yes, I am using the special Korean version of C2MAN.

Even when I do something like "c2man /h", which I assume should do *something* even when it can't access the cartridge, just does nothing. It reads from the gotek for a few seconds, then sits there for a minute, then returns to the MSX DOS prompt.

My method for transferring files to the MSX DOS disk image, is to mount it on a Windows 10 system using ImDisk, copy over the files, unmount, then transfer the resulting image file to the gotek. Would this method corrupt the files by any chance?

By penpal

Supporter (8)

24-02-2023, 22:26

Here's to demonstrate what I'm seeing. Perhaps you are able to spot any obvious mistake of mine.

This is what happens regardless of the parameters I pass to the program.

By Manuel

Ascended (19677)

24-02-2023, 23:04

It's strange that it says COMMAND version 2.2... What if you use a more 'normal' command.com? Would that matter?

By Briqunullus

Paladin (760)

25-02-2023, 08:49

Manuel wrote:

It's strange that it says COMMAND version 2.2... What if you use a more 'normal' command.com? Would that matter?

Probably not, it's a known version, identical to 1.11.

By Manuel

Ascended (19677)

25-02-2023, 23:20

THe C2MAN program tries to detect MSX-DOS2... perhaps that is going wrong somehow, with this version? Probably not, but who knows... it seems to use the standard GETVER call.