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N8 MSX-DOS [message #6957]

Sun, 26 January 2020 15:03

bifo
Messages: 48
Registered: October 2019

Member

https://github.com/Konamiman/Nextor

MSX-DOS has been open-sourced by the owner of the MSX copyright, the man behind the MSX standard. I wish I had the ability to put together drivers for the incompatibilities that the N8 has, but if someone has done it for CPM then MSX-DOS (which is compatible enough with CPM to run CPM programs) it shouldn't be terribly difficult.

I would hope.

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Re: N8 MSX-DOS [message #6961 is a reply to message #6957]

Wed, 29 January 2020 07:29

etchedpixels
Messages: 333
Registered: October 2015

Senior Member

It has not been open sourced. It's got a narrowly limited non-commercial licence that allows Nestor to modify it and accept changes but nobody else.

"Derivative works are not allowed without explicit permission from the copyright holders. "Derivative works" means independent projects that are created as forks of the original source code for the Software."

So unless Nestor Vilchez accepts your changes into his base tree you can't actually do anything with it.

It would IMHO not be that hard to clone the MSX-DOS API and it is well documented. Most of the code you need is a FAT file system (which is available open source in C and far better than the old MSXDOS one), and the low level BIOS drivers which are partly there - but lacking TMS9918A video console support. That again is available in several locations in open source and actually not too hard to write at least for the text modes.

It still wouldn't run most MSX software because you really need to be hardware compatible.

Alan

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