Nextor

Nextor is a disk operating system for MSX computers. It is built on top of the source code of MSX-DOS 2.31, released in 1991.

The source code of Nextor is published with permission from the MSX Licensing Corporation under certain terms. Please take a moment to read the license terms for details.

Please visit the Nextor section in Konamiman's MSX page for binaries.

Repository structure

Note that there is no master branch, but branches for each major version of Nextor (v2.0 and v2.1 currently).

• source: The source code of Nextor itself.

  • kernel: The kernel ROM, includes the FDISK tool.

  • command: NEXTOR.SYS, COMMAND2.COM and the command line tools that were originally supplied with MSX-DOS.

  • tools: The new command line tools created for Nextor.

• buildtools: Tools needed for building Nextor on Windows (deprecated) and Linux (recommended). Includes the source for two custom made tools: mknexrom (C) and SymToEqus (C#).

• docs: Documentation for both users and developers.

How to build Nextor

The "official" environment for building Nextor is Linux. Legacy support for Windows is still offered but it's deprecated. Read on for the ugly details.

Linux

To build Nextor on Linux you'll need:

• make. On Debian/Ubuntu-ish systems you can just apt-get install make.
• The native MACRO80 tools provided by the M80dotNet project. Go to the releases section and download the appropriate variant of the latest version.
• SDCC, for FDISK and the command line tools written in C. On Debian/Ubuntu-ish systems you can just apt-get install sdcc.
• objcopy from the binutils package. On Debian/Ubuntu-ish systems you can just apt-get install binutils.
• sjasm v0.39 to assemble some of the drivers. You have it in the buildtools/Linux folder, but you can also build it from the sources (remember to switch to the v0.39 branch).
• mknexrom to generate the ROM files with the drivers. You have it in the buildtools/Linux folder, but you can also build it from the source in the buildtools/sources directory.

Except for those obtained via apt, you'll need to place these tools at a suitable location to be able to use them, e.g. /usr/bin.

There are five makefiles that will take care of building the different components of Nextor. Once the tools are in place you can just cd to the appropriate directory and run make:

• source/kernel: builds the kernel ROM files and copies them to the bin/kernels directory. There are handy aliases for the different ROM files, so you can run e.g. make ide; see the kernels rule at the beginning of the file for the full list.
• source/command/msxdos: builds NEXTOR.SYS and copies it to the bin/tools directory.
• source/tools: builds the command line tools written in assembler and copies them to the bin/tools directory.
• source/tools/C: builds the command line tools written in C and copies them to the bin/tools directory.
• source: this one just invokes the other four in sequence, so it builds pretty much everything. It supports make clean too.

You may want to take a look at this now closed pull request from Dean Netherton that contains a different attempt at writing makefiles for bulding Nextor. It even has some nice extra features like building FDD and HDD images with Nextor, and building the mknexrom tool itself.

Windows

If you use Windows 10 the recommended approach is to use the Linux tools and scripts with WSL. If you use an older Windows the recommended approach is to upgrade to Windows 10 (or to install Linux in a separate partition or disk, or in a virtual machine).

However, if for some reason you are still using a non-WSL capable Windows, support for building Nextor is available as well; but note that it will probably be removed at some point in the future, as it's a maintenance burden (seriously, give Windows 10 and WSL a try, it's really worth it).

To build Nextor on Windows you need:

• The tools in the buildtools/Windows folder. These must be placed in some folder included in the PATH environment variable.
• SDCC, for FDISK and the command line tools written in C.
• .NET Framework 2.0 or higher, for the SymToEqus tool.

You'll find a number of .bat files available at the same locations of the Linux makefiles except for the one in source (see "Linux" section above). These are not "makefile-ish" and always build the whole set of kernels/tools.