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Standardizing drive letter assignment regardless of disk rom location

Open sdsnatcher73 opened this issue 5 years ago • 3 comments

On machines with built in disk-drives where the disk rom is in slot 0 (e.g. Sony HB-G900P) the floppy drives will become A: and B: and the first Nextor drive will be C: (system will sill boot from C:). The same would happen if a machine had no internal disk drives but an external disk drive was inserted into slot 1 and nextor in slot 2. On machines where the disk rom is in a higher slot, nextor will assign it's drive from A: and disk drives will become C: and D:.

I think it would be good if Nextor would always let the DiskROM initialize first (and let disk drives be A: and B:) and Nextor drives become C: onwards. I believe this could be accomplished by having Nextor hook into H.STKE on boot and let the disk rom initialize prior to Nextor, regardless if it is in a lower or higher slot.

What needs to be considered also is what if there are no internal disk drives? Should Nextor start from A: or still use C:, my vote would be to keep it on C: in such a case as well.

Of course this is just an/my opinion but it would make behavior more consistent across different MSX machines and also bring it in line how PC's behave with MS-DOS (and onwards).

sdsnatcher73 avatar Jul 31 '20 17:07 sdsnatcher73

I think this way one could also still boot from floppy when a Nextor based device is inserted, also in line with how things works on PC (although that currently does not work on HB-G900P, actually machine won't boot from floppy or Nextor if a floppy is inserted on such a machine)

sdsnatcher73 avatar Jul 31 '20 17:07 sdsnatcher73

An alternative solution (at least it introduces the same consistency) is to reinitialize the FDD within Nextor. MMCSD does this when it detects an already initialized FDD so on HB-F500 MMCSD will still take A: drive (since version 5.50 of the firmware).

sdsnatcher73 avatar Sep 01 '21 04:09 sdsnatcher73

ECFC2A39-2A68-4C60-A224-85E0B91DF646

sdsnatcher73 avatar Sep 01 '21 05:09 sdsnatcher73