Nostalgia for the KUVT: run the MSX emulator for Linux

Foreword

Acquaintance with the computer each of us started in our own way and at different times. Someone remembers DVK, “Iskra” and “Agatha”, and someone immediately sat down behind an IBM PC under Win 9x. Quite often, nostalgic articles come across that are always interesting to read, for you compare what you write to personal experience and remember how it was with you.

But I had this:

Yamaha KUVT2 - student seat

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Such "workstations" - Yamaha YIS503III, in the mid-late 90s were in our school computer class. There were 9 of them + a teacher’s computer and a dot-matrix printer. The whole thing was connected by a local network with a topology “tire”. The monitor of the student machines was in 256 shades of green.

Monochrome student display

Teacher computer was "more abruptly" - YIS805 / 128. His monitor was in color and there were two 3.5 "flops" for 720 KB floppy disks. This computer did not have HDD, but there were two slots for cartridges.

The appearance of the teacher's desktop is not inferior to the then IBM PC (late 80s)

The heart of both machines was the 8-bit Zilog Z80A, which, by the way, I didn’t know until recently, considering that the Spectrum processor had passed by me.

Teacher Machine Loading Screen

As for software, traditionally for the 8-bit of that time, the Basic interpreter, specially ported by Microsoft for MSX machines, was stitched into ROM. There were OS - CP / M, with which I did not happen to face MSX-DOS. There was also a Pascal compiler on floppy disks.

In the tenth grade, we began computer science. Having reached these computers, for the last two school years I have been constantly called “hanging out” in their surroundings. I would like to say thanks to our computer science teacher, V. V. Tynyansky, who in every way encouraged our craving for the study of computer technology and spent every week in extracurricular time, on a voluntary basis, elective classes. There I mastered basic and DOS, and then, the only one of our issue began to program in Pascal. Pascal demanded that DOS be booted from a floppy disk, and a primitive IDE was also launched from a floppy disk, so over time I took over the teacher’s machine - it was easier, because the Noob hanging systems were not uncommon then.

The Internet then was practically no one. In the classical sense, only one of our classmates had a PC (with Windows 95 !!! Yes, that was awesome !!!), machines with a clock frequency of 1000 MHz were spoken of as a ghostly legend ... YES, in general there were good old ones time.

The photo clearly shows the keyboard of these computers. Notice the English layout? In the university, sitting at the Robotron with the layout we were used to for a long time, I could not relearn myself ...

What am I doing all about? And the fact that I was hit by a random find on nostalgic motives - an emulator of this miracle called OpenMSX . My heart sank and two evenings I spent setting / adjusting / mastering. What do I suggest? I propose to install all this together and see how it was, in those distant and irrevocably past times of KUVT

1. Install and run OpenMSX

The advantage of this particular emulator can be called its cross-platform. The official site has distributions for all popular operating systems. I, as a convinced linuksoid, will talk about the installation in relation to Linux, or rather Arch Linux, in the AUR user repository of which there are PKGBUILDs of the corresponding packages .

I will not write in detail about the assembly of the software PKGBUILDs - the archkeeper knows himself, for a ubuntovod or a Fedor fan, this is still not relevant. Let me just say that he needs openmsx itself, and will recommend the front-end to it under the screaming name “catapult” - openmsx-catapult . Although the console and the game, but for the convenience of immersion in nostalgia is the most use windows and buttons.

So we compiled and installed the packages we needed, what next? Next we need to correctly specify the emulator configuration of the emulated hardware platform - I was interested in the Yamaha YIS805 / 128. Out of the box, her model is not in the emulator, so we follow the link where the real treasure for MSX phages is located . Download systemroms.zip . Unpack the archive:

$ unzip systemroms.zip

And copy the contents to the emulator resource directory:

 # cp -rv systemroms/* /usr/share/openmsx/systemroms/

Run the "catapult":

 $ catapult

She will ask us about the location of the emulator binaries and resource directories:

Making sure that everything is correct, click OK. The program will check the specified paths and compile a list of available virtual iron configurations:

And show us the emulator launch window. In the “MSX type” drop-down list, I selected the desired YIS805 / 128:

Click Start, and ...

Good old times are returning from non-existence ...

The MSX boot screen appears, and right after it is the MSX Basic v 2.1 interpreter prompt.

And, yes, you can shake the old days and write Hello World:

The text can be driven directly into the emulator, and you can copy-paste through the appropriate tab "catapult":

And after clicking on “Type”, the text will appear in the emulator window, by pressing F5 it can be launched for execution:

Screenshots are made on the Video Controls tab, by pressing the Grab button:

By default, they are saved in the path ~ / $ USER / .openMSX / screenshots / . In theory, the path can be changed, but it doesn’t work for me from something, the screens are saved only by default settings.

So, we have a working "Yamaha", let's see now that she knew how

2. Load CP / M

The image of the disk c of this OS (my same age as !!!) was not found on the ftp-server specified by the link above, but it was found by the link obtained from the discussion on sourceforge . After unpacking, the archive revealed disk images: SYSTEM.DSK - boot diskette CP / M and PROG.DSK - apparently some additional software. We “insert” both disks into virtual “flops” - boot disk in drive A. In order for the download to take place, the emulator was told to connect the Panasonic FS-CA1 extension using the emulator method:

And we press start. The bootloader messages appear:

CP / M boot process

And after them and the command line prompt CP / M. CP / M is similar to DOS, I am not familiar with it, but the dir command works.

Distribution Contents

I don’t know what to do next - I’m not so oldfax oldfag to remember CP / M

3. Download MSX-DOS 2.2

With DOS, things are simpler - the archive with floppy disks is still there . Download it, unpack it and select the MSXDOS2T.DSK image. In the emulator settings we set to use the extension msxdos2

After loading see the usual DOS-console

MSX-DOS understood the dosovsky dir and * nix-ing ls - I did not know about that at school

In the directory A: \ tools of this ancient dos there were some utilities familiar to unix: ls, grep, tail and some others:

In general, with operating systems everything is OK. And what about the application software?

4. Launch Application Software: Development Tools

I found the Turbo Pascal 3.0 compiler , very similar to the one I studied then. Only here it was located in some strange archive with the extension * .lzh, which, after a brief googling, was identified as an LHA-archive, for which the AUR has the corresponding package . We put it unpack the archive:

 $ lha e turbo.lzh

At the exit having:

 -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 768  29 2023 cmdlin.pas -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 5504  29 2023 lister.pas -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 11776  29 2023 mcdemo.mcs -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 4608  29 2023 mc.hlp -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 896  29 2023 mc-mod00.inc -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 1664  29 2023 mc-mod01.inc -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 3200  29 2023 mc-mod02.inc -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 4480  29 2023 mc-mod03.inc -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 8832  29 2023 mc-mod04.inc -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 11136  29 2023 mc-mod05.inc -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 6272  29 2023 mc.pas -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 11776  29 2023 nswp.com -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 6784  29 2023 read.me -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 25472  29 2023 tinst.com -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 4480  29 2023 tinst.dta -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 3968  29 2023 tinst.msg -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 30848  29 2023 turbo.com -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 68188  2 21:28 turbo.lzh -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 1536  29 2023 turbo.msg -rw-r--r-- 1 maisvendoo users 1152  29 2023 turbo.ovr

M-de, it seems that we need. Now the question is - how does it get stuffed into the emulator?

There are two ways. The first is to create a floppy image, as described in the corresponding section of the documentation . There are many tasty things, but we will go the other way, in a simpler and faster way. Create a directory and unpack the archive into it.

 $ mkdir -p ~/msx/tp $ cd ~/msx/tp $ lha e ~/install/openmsx/turbo.lzh

There we also place the contents of the archive turbo_lib3.zip - additional modules.

Now we specify our directory as a disk B.

Let's see what happened. It turned out great:

Directory of the host system as a disk "Yamaha"

Run the pascal:

 B> cd tp B> turbo

And ... I was disappointed. Launched Wednesday severely buggy, spat krakozybrami and Vistula. Searches led to different versions of Turbo Pascal for DOS and CP / M, but none of them has so far been possible to bring to a common denominator. Well, I will leave it for later, the inquisitive reader may have more experience in this matter.

4. Launch Application Software: Games

Well, where do without them. On the MSX came the mass of games, both developed for it, and ported from other platforms. I was always interested in games a little, but one toy still hooked me, then, 15 years ago, so much so that I passed it with interest to the end.

To this day, I did not remember the name, but the plot: we fly by helicopter, free the prisoners from the barracks, killing enemies along the way. And there was something similar to Coper in the title ... I found it in the junk files for MSX . It is called “Coplifter”. The game is packed with the LHA archive, put it in our folder folder and unpack it. Inside there will be two binaries and a “script” on BASIC choplift.bas, to start the game

 A>B: B>cd games B>basic choplift.bas

The Basic interpreter is started, and after it - the game:

An encouraging start ...

... she is the one - Choplifter !!!

The emulator "eats" and ROMs with games, of which, according to this link many times already. A lot of rums are googling - I first launched the same helicopter with rum, and only then I figured out the archive and the launch from under dos.

Instead of an epilogue

Perhaps the article turned out more emotional than practical. A date with childhood, it is. Unsolved questions on working with the emulator weight - the same pascal now does not give me rest. But this is not a one-day deal if there is free time.

Somewhere in the early 2000s, after I graduated from school, we bought an IBM PC on the stumps with Windows 98 SE on board in a computer class. The Yamakhi sent some village to the school near our district center. The floppy disks with my creativity went with them - the quest about the flight to Mars, “Sea Battle”, a simple DBMS written in Pascal ... Expensively, I would give now for live floppy disks with my FIRST programs.

PS:

Having rummaged in the emulator and googling, I still found a normal pascal.
Only here on the YIS-805/128 dos at least kill yourself when booting includes the 40x25 mode, in which the lines of the editor run over each other.

MSX Turbo R loads dos in 80x25 mode and everything looks kosher

What we will see after launch