Didn’t realize there was an MSX flash cart out there. That’s a cool list. Didn’t realize ther was a Contra for the system either.
That flash cart also has additional audio hardware in it (Konami SCC). Very cool
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I believe Contra for MSX is basically NES contra except with static screens. I got an MSX flash cart a few months ago but haven’t done anything with it because I’m terrible.
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There are extra levels on the MSX Contra. Gamesack covered it:
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This looks interesting!
Pi plus custom hardware and software in a proper keyboard case.
Supports: MSX series, plus Speccy, CPC and C64. Possibly PC-Engine and X68000 support following.
That’s really cool but that price is really steep. I see they are planning to do an x68000, I’d love to get my hands on one of those. I might consider using my christmas bonus on it
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Yeah price is high at €400
I think X68000 would come as a software update for this.
Does anyone know of a replacement PSU for the FM Towns II?
I spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to get translated Snatcher working on my MSX w/ MegaFlashRom SCC+ SD and Sofarun. The reason is that the translation doesn’t want to run off floppy dsk image and the install disk doesn’t run properly (the batch files loop some text).
Because this was also extremely difficult to google I wanted to write it out here. What I ended up doing was doing a manual install of the English Snatcher translation on my windows computer direct to the SD card.
The exact steps are:
- Go to the translation website and download the translated dsk files they provide.
- Get WinImage or another floppy dsk extraction tool.
- Use WinImage to extract all files from disk 0 (snatche0.dsk) to a folder (I called mine “snatcher”) on your sd card
- Delete everything in there except DSK2SAV.COM, FDSAVE.COM, SAV2DSK.COM, SNATCHER.COM, and SNATCHER.SCR
- Take the remaining dsk files you got in step 1 and copy them to this folder.
- Rename the remaining dsk files as follows: Snatche1.dsk to SNATCHER.001, Snatche2.dsk to SNATCHER.002, and Snatche3.dsk to SNATCHER.003.
Now you can run SNATCHER.COM inside sofarun and things just work.
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I’d pick up an MSX just to try this.
Is it possible to run a translated version of Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2 using a similar method?
They are way simpler as they are cart games and you can ips translate a rom dump as usual, and there are several methods including sofarun to load those like an everdrive.
Hi! Thanks for the valuable info! I have tried your proposed method but I am prompted with the following message “this is not a Snatcher save disk image”. Attached you’ll find the structure I used in my SD Card and how it looks on sofarun. Let me know if I am doing something incorrect, many thanks!
Weird, not sure exactly what the difference is.
I have my files inside a SNATCHER folder like disk:\SNATCHER\ – maybe that matters? I tried deleting the save file that was created but my “install” still seems to work.
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Hi, everyone. It’s taken seemingly forever, but I’m now here at Retro Game Boards, and I’m glad we have a central thread for Japanese PC-related subjects!
Though I lack any cool hardware (and have only a few boxed games of note, like the first two Power DoLLS and some A-Train titles), I’ve been pretty invested in this interest for a while. I recently got back into all this after doing a panel on the subject at this year’s MAGFest convention:
Beyond that, I’ve started doing game showcases every Sunday on Twitter, which forces me to play and research titles I either don’t know or could stand to know better. It’s good stuff, especially during quarantine times. Playing through old, retro-at-the-time PC-6001 doujin/magazine games might one day seem cool if I keep this up.
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Hi! @poptart good news! I was able to run Snatcher using your method on a different MSX here is what I did.
I was using a Panasonic A1 WX with Megaflashrom and sofarun as loader, the game loaded with your method but stalled when pressing 0 to start game, the MSX was frozen with CAPS key on… my guess was that maybe the RAM was not enough to run it.
Next I used another machine to test, I used a Hitbit Sony HB-F1 with:
-Slot 1: SD 512 Mapper with sofarun
-Slot 2: Megaflashrom as SCC sound cartdrige
The game was executed correctly with SCC sound and also I was able to save my progress.
Thank you very much for posting this method of loading!
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Good on you for not giving up!
My sony HB-F5 has the same amount of ram, but I got my MegaFlashRom SCC with 512k of RAM so that might be the difference:
These are the requirements (play from harddisk):
- Any MSX2 or later
- BDOS 2.2 or later
- IDE or SCSI harddisk
- 192KB of Mapped RAM
- 128KB of VRAM
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Huge envy for your beautiful MSX!
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Gorgeous!
