Manuel

Ok, so I was wrong to say completely useless. Unintuitive perhaps, (for the quick user anyway).

I have now though, read the manual, have renamed me some roms, and I just loaded my first disk image successfully. I suspect now I'm up and running, I'll love it to death thanks to all the openGL trickery.

I therefore hereby formally apologise for causing you any hurt feelings. In future, before I open my big mouth in a forum, I'll check who made a program and make sure they are not a member of the forum first

Thanks everyone for your help. I'm not used to having to actually think in order to use an MSX. I'm gonna deactivate the think cap and continue being retarded now.

Ghehehe ^_^.

Well I have to add that the whole openMSX manual and all is kinda spartans. Maybe 'cuz the programmer himself wrote it? (big mistake) it's incomplete and confusing. I had troubles myself, so did several others. In the end we figured it all out (thanx manual for the online comments here) and then you'll notice the beauty of openMSX as being a solid emulator.

tip to the openMSX team: create a "dummy/quickstart" manual and a technical one with ishues like where to place files etc. etc.

And, for completion, I must say BLUEMSX is doing a very good job at the momen too (except for the stupid romdb.dat file ofcourse ) . . a bit competition only raises the end results.!
keep emulating dudes.

Actually the manual was written by Manuel, who only recently started doing some programming, but at the time he wrote it was completely non-programmer. (correct me if I'm wrong, Manuel )

That said, to me openMSX is easy to understand, but I haven't read the manual... I got help by people on IRC that were already using it.

By the way Wibbly: While you're at it, why don't you check Space Manbow on MSX2+ as well?

Snout : Is there a different version of it, or does it have code specific to MSX2+?

The very same version usses some of the MSX2+ features, if available. Just check how smooth things are scrolling all of a sudden

Wasn't the smoothness the same, with the difference that the borders are masked on 2+ ?

Could be, it's been a looooooooong time since I've played the game on MSX2 you know Still, masked borders sure make the game look a lot smoother. Optical illusion rules.

Hi Wibbly,

OK, let's get in to this

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Sorry, wasn't intending to hurt anyone's feelings. I did check out the manual... and at the risk of hurting feelings again, it seemed overly verbose and I couldn't find the necessary information where I expected to see it

Did you read the openMSX (emulator) manual and/or the Catapult (GUI) manual?

Anyway, about where to place ROMs: I'd expect to find that in the Setup Guide.
Then I'd expect to find info about it in the "System ROMs" section.
There you can read all about C-BIOS and dumping ROMs etc. From section 3.2 I quote:
"When the ROMs are dumped, you have a disk with a number of ROM images. Copy these images to the subdirectory called roms in the machine directory. For example, if you dumped the ROMs of a Philips NMS 8250 machine, copy them to share/machines/Philips_NMS_8250/roms. Look in the file hardwareconfig.xml for the file names openMSX expects the ROM images to have."
After this, that specific machine will run like a charm.
What was the difficulty about finding this and doing this exactly?

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I must admit though, that even having run the frontend, the whole list of machines to choose from doesn't add to the program's appeal.

The basic idea of openMSX is to achieve the most accurate emulation possible. For this, you need to discern between the different MSX models, who are all the same. We ship configuration files for a lot of models (without ROMs), a fake model (the Boosted MSX2, without ROMs) and two other fake models, based on the C-BIOS bios.
Anyway, since you need to be able to choose a model to emulate, there is this combobox in the GUI. Not really strange, is it?

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The fact that it also seems without asking to have made entries in the My Documents folder

openMSX needs to store data like the contents of your clock chip's CMOS and stuff *somewhere*. We chose the My Documents folder, since it's the closest to a home directory on Windows systems and there exists one for each user of the system.

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I'm guessing I've got to use that program the manual speaks of to check checksums and work out which roms I have (the only 2 I'm sure of are dumps from my own Canon V20 and Toshiba HX10 machines)

and

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Next version of openMSX will probably feature a single directory for all your roms too.

Indeed. In fact, this is mostly implemented in the current development version. It's in fact exactly what Wibbly says: the configuration files of the machines have the SHA1 sum of the ROM files it needs and it looks into some specific ROM directory (called ROM pool) if the right ROM files are present.
We hope this will solve most of the uncomfortableness about the installation of the system ROMs.

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I tried that, but the emulator sits there saying no cartridge Quote: That's because the default machine is something called 'cbios', which is not a real MSX, but a completely copyright free replacement.

Indeed. This is clearly indicated in the manual (as shown above) and I also wrote about it in my previous post. Also: that same screen says: "C-BIOS ver 0.17" which could have hinted you (after reading my previous post) that you were running C-BIOS....

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I therefore hereby formally apologise for causing you any hurt feelings. In future, before I open my big mouth in a forum, I'll check who made a program and make sure they are not a member of the forum first

Apologies accepted of course!
In the future: try using the contact options the emulator documentation provides. We are always happy to help openMSX users. Also: try really reading the manual ;-)

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Well I have to add that the whole openMSX manual and all is kinda spartans. Maybe 'cuz the programmer himself wrote it? (big mistake) it's incomplete and confusing

The initial version (in the form of a HOWTO) was written by Jorrith Schaap (as a newbie user) and me (as an experienced user, but not really developer at the time). Later it is transformed into a manual by Maarten ter Huurne (developer) and me.

The thing is: if you don't tell us what's bad about the manual, how can we ever fix it? So, please tell us what's missing and confusing in that manual.
If you put software out in the open you expect people to give feedback (in vain, most of the time, I guess)...

I'm planning to write a FAQ in the near future tho, which might help beginners.
Maybe a getting started thing would also be useful, indeed.

Oh, about Space Manbow: it uses the hardware scrolling features of the MSX2+, which gives you stable side borders (they're chunky on the MSX2).

Last thing: PLEASE give us feedback! We really do something with it! It will help everyone a lot more than putting blunt complains in general forums! ;-)

"who are all the same" -> "who are not all the same"

Well, as I said in one of my other posts here, I did indeed read the manual, every part of it, and have no problem using the program now.

The only thing I'd say about the manual, is that it needs simplifying. Perhaps though this is not a good idea for inexperienced emulator users though. But from a personal point of view, I'd like to see the information about where to store the machine roms, RIGHT at the beginning. I think the biggest factor for me initially, was that I already had a pile of roms (although with the exception of dumps from my own hardware) none of it was machine specific. Indeed, my original dumps are back in England, so I'm using a few roms I sourced of the internet.
I kind of expected, as is the case with the other emulators, to just dump the roms I had in a rom or bios directory and fire it up.
This is of course my own fault, I read no documentation prior to the download of OpenMSX, so did not realise at what it was attempting to be. I was downloading every emulator I could find in order to play the tape files I'd downloaded. Which in the end I rectified by getting a disk manager, and dropping the files onto a disk.

I think I've also admitted now to liking this emulator. The separate machines idea allows me to try games I couldn't run on my own Canon V-20 and Toshiba HX-10 models all those years ago (almost 20 of them), and it may sound stupid, but I'd always wanted to find a JVC machine, as I had read a LONG time ago, that most games were programmed on these machines.

One final question I have, concerning emulation in general (this problem is evident in each emulator I have) .... Does putting the tape files on a disk only work SOMETIMES? I tried to load up Gauntlet, but not one single emulator appears to like it. None of the emulators I have appear to support the loading of .bas or .ldr files, so I put the gauntlet files on disk and when I run the code, it just goes blue screen and does nothing. If I make the machine an MSX2 it just tells me illegal operation. I have this game back in England, and it works perfectly on my Canon V-20, and I've tried using that machine in openMSX and still have no success. It was always a pain in the proverbial though, because it seemed particularly sensitive to volume in order to load correctly, and was one of a handful of games I couldn't leave the tape machine set to "DATA" in order to successfully load.

Any comments or help would be appreciated. It's not that I can't get gauntlet for the PC or Amiga etc., it's that whole nostalgia thing. I got much mileage out of the MSX version, and whilst I always wished it looked like the Atari ST version, when I finally got my Atari and a copy of the game, I never enjoyed it nearly as much.

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One final question I have, concerning emulation in general (this problem is evident in each emulator I have) .... Does putting the tape files on a disk only work SOMETIMES?

While I do not know if this is applicable to the particular game you mention, a lot of games use custom loaders so it's not possible to simple put the tape files on a disk.

The best way to make copies of your tapes is to sample them with your PC soundcard at high accuracy. You can then use emulators that support .WAV files (openMSX does) to load the games.

You can then try to convert the .WAV to the .CAS format, which is a binary representation of the analog cassette data. However, with games that use custom loaders which do not adhere to the way the MSX BIOS reads and stores data, this does not work. Leaving them in bulky .WAV format is the only way to preserve them for the future.

Oh well, that probably explains it then. Unfortunately, until I get all my stuff shipped over, my old cassette games are thousands of miles out of my reach <sigh> :::: goes and lays on the bed sobbing, wishing he'd never had the urge to play old MSX games after getting tired of UT2004 ::::

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I think I've also admitted now to liking this emulator. The separate machines idea allows me to try games I couldn't run on my own Canon V-20 and Toshiba HX-10 models all those years ago (almost 20 of them), and it may sound stupid, but I'd always wanted to find a JVC machine, as I had read a LONG time ago, that most games were programmed on these machines.

You need the real specific ROMs for those machines to let them work properly, of course.

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One final question I have, concerning emulation in general (this problem is evident in each emulator I have) .... Does putting the tape files on a disk only work SOMETIMES? I tried to load up Gauntlet, but not one single emulator appears to like it. None of the emulators I have appear to support the loading of .bas or .ldr files, so I put the gauntlet files on disk and when I run the code, it just goes blue screen and does nothing. If I make the machine an MSX2 it just tells me illegal operation.

No emulators support loading ldr or bas files directly, because they need to be on a *medium*, like a tape or disk image. Just like on a real MSX.
If you found .bas/.ldr files (mostly loaders, see faq.msxnet.org/suffix.html) they were most likely meant to be run from disk. So, they should work when you put them on a disk image.

The FAQ gives you some hints on how to run MSX1 games on MSX2 machines. Check that.

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I have this game back in England, and it works perfectly on my Canon V-20, and I've tried using that machine in openMSX and still have no success. It was always a pain in the proverbial though, because it seemed particularly sensitive to volume in order to load correctly, and was one of a handful of games I couldn't leave the tape machine set to "DATA" in order to successfully load.

The Canon V-20 doesn't have a disk drive, so it won't be able to use disks. You will have to use an external drive with it. Use an extension like the Sony HBK-30 or another external disk drive. Note that you need the BIOS ROM for external drives. (In a real system this ROM is in the cartrdige that you have to insert in the machine, which is the interface between MSX and drive.)