I hope this little article can help those like me who have had problems starting games from floppy drives. Once you understand the mechanism everything is simple and will allow those who want to deepen their knowledge of OpenMsx perhaps by trying to use other peripherals. So happy reading.
Before starting, if you don't have OpenMsx you can download it from here while the BIOSes of the various machines are more or less easily found online. If you already have all the tools available you can start reading.
STARTING VIA CATAPLUT
But now let's start step by step and see how it is possible to start a game from disc using the Catapult application. Once the application has been started we will see the screen shown in figure 2. It is possible that by default there may be some options selected but it doesn't matter let's see step by step what needs to be done. First we must select a machine to emulate, as a first test we select an MSX1 without Floppy, for the test I chose Canon V-20 (JP), then we select the Panasonic FS-FD1A item from the list of extensions. You should therefore be in the condition like those shown in figure 3. At this point you must choose the DSK file to execute, this is possible by pressing the Disk A button. Once the image has been loaded, press the Start button. If everything goes as we expect, the emulator will start with our game, as you can see in figure 4.
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- Figure 2
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- Figure 3
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- Figure 4
STARTING VIA OPEN MSX
Even simpler if from the Catapult start menu we select a machine with the floppy included such as the Philips NMS8245 it will not be necessary to load the additional extension for managing the floppy as seen in figure 5. At this point you have to choose the file DSK to run, this is possible by pressing the Disk A button. Once the image is loaded, press the Start button. If everything goes as we expect, the emulator will start with our game, as you can see in figure 6.
START VIA COMMAND PROMT
- -ext to load extensions and command
- -machine to load the machine bios
- -diska to select the game disc
- Find the name of the machine to use, this can be found in the openmsx-19.1\share\machines folder
- Once we have found the name of the machine to insert as a parameter we can execute the following command:
openmsx.exe -machine Philips_NMS_8245 -diska DOS1_the-castel.dsk
- Find the name of the machine to use, this can be found in the openmsx-19.1\share\machines folder
- Find the name of the extension to use, this can be found in the openmsx-19.1\share\extensions folder
- Once we have found the name of the machine to insert as a parameter we can execute the following command:
openmsx.exe -ext Panasonic_FS-FD1A -machine Canon_V-20_JP -diska DOS1_the-castel.dsk
I hope this short article is useful to you too.