Foreword

Each of us began his acquaintance with the computer in his own way and at different times. Someone remembers the DCK, Iskra and Agatha, while someone immediately sat down at the IBM PC under Win 9x. Quite often there are nostalgic articles, which are always interesting to read, because you compare what you wrote with personal experience and remember how it was with you.

But I had it like this:

Yamaha KUVT2 - student place


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

Monochrome student display




The teacher's computer was "cooler" - YIS805 / 128. He had a color monitor and had two 3.5 "flop flops" for 720 Kb floppy disks. This computer did not have an HDD, but there were two cartridge slots.

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


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

The loading screen of the teacher’s machine


As for the software, traditionally for the 8-bit system of that time, the Basic interpreter was wired in ROM, specially ported by Microsoft for MSX standard machines. and whether the operating system - CP / M, which I was not able to face and MSX-DOS on floppy disks had the same Pascal compiler..

In the tenth grade, computer science began. Having torn to these computers, I’ve spent the last two school years constantly what is called “hanging around” in their surroundings. I would like to say thank you to our teacher of computer science, V. Tyniansky, who in every possible way encouraged our craving for the study of computer technology and conducted extracurricular classes every week after school hours, on a voluntary basis. There I mastered BASIC and DOS, and then, the only one of our release started programming in Pascal. Pascal demanded that DOS be loaded from the floppy disk, and the primitive IDE was also launched from the floppy disk, so over time I occupied the teacher's machine - it was easier, because Nubian system curtains were not uncommon then.

Virtually no one had the Internet back then. In the classical sense, only one of our classmates had a PC (with Windows 95 !!! Yes, that was cool !!!), they talked about machines with a clock frequency of 1000 MHz whereas they were a ghostly legend ... YES, in general, they were good old time.

The keyboard of these computers is clearly visible in the photo. Have you noticed the English layout? At the university, sitting at Robotron with the layout we were used to, I could not relearn for a long time ...

Why am I all this? Moreover, I was hit by nostalgic motives by a random find - an emulator of this miracle called OpenMSX . My heart pinched and for two evenings I spent on installation / tuning / mastering. What do I suggest? I propose to establish all this together and see how it was in those distant and irrevocably bygone times of the KUVT

1. Install and run OpenMSX

The advantage of this particular emulator can be called its cross-platform. On the official website there are distributions for all popular OSs. I, as a convinced Linuxoid, will talk about the installation with respect to Linux, or rather Arch Linux, in whose user AUR repository there are PKGBUILDs of the corresponding packages .

I won’t write in detail about PKGBUILD software assembly - the archivod himself knows that it’s still not relevant for the ubunt driver or Fedora fan. I can only say that openmsx itself needs it , and I recommend a frontend to it under the screaming name "catapult" - openmsx-catapult . Although the console and Yru, but for the convenience of immersion in nostalgia, it is best to use the windows and buttons.

So, we have collected and installed the packages we need, what next? Next, we need to correctly specify the configuration of the emulated hardware platform for the emulator - I was interested in 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 resources directory:

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

We launch the "catapult":

$ catapult

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



After making sure that everything is correct, click OK. The program will check the indicated paths and compile a list of available virtual hardware configurations:



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



Click Start, and ...

Good old days come back from nonexistence ...


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



And, yes, you can shake it in antiquity and write Hello World: You



can type text directly in the emulator, or you can copy it through the corresponding tab “catapults”:



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



We take screenshots on the Video Controls tab by pressing the Grab button:



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

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

2. Download CP / M

The disk image from this OS (my peer !!!) did not appear on the ftp server indicated by the link above, but was found using the link obtained from the discussion on sourceforge . After unpacking, the disk images were found in the archive: SYSTEM.DSK - boot disk CP / M and PROG.DSK - apparently some additional software. We “insert” both disks into virtual “floperies” - boot into drive A. In order for the download to take place, by typing, the emulator was instructed to connect the Panasonic FS-CA1 extension:



And press start. Boot loader messages appear:

CP / M boot process,


followed by the CP / M command prompt. 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 old-aged I am an old-fag 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 image MSXDOS2T.DSK. In the emulator settings we set to use the msxdos2 extension.



After loading, we see the familiar DOS console.

MSX-DOS understood the dos dir and * nix-ls - at school I did not know about it.


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



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

4. Launching application software: development tools

There was also a Turbo Pascal 3.0 compiler , very similar to the one I studied then. Only now he was in some strange archive with the extension * .lzh, which after a short google was identified as an LHA archive, for which AUR has a corresponding package . We put it, unpack the archive:

$ lha e turbo.lzh

At the exit, having:

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

M-de, it seems like what we need. Now the question is - how to shove it into the emulator?

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

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

We’ll also place the contents of the turbo_lib3.zip archive — additional modules.

Now we will indicate our directory as drive B.



Let's see what happened. It turned out

fine : The host system directory as a "Yamaha" drive


Run pascal:

B> cd tp
B> turbo

And ... disappointment awaited me. The neglected environment was severely buggy, spat on crabs and hung. Searches led to different versions of Turbo Pascal for DOS and CP / M, but none of them have yet been able to lead to a common denominator. Well, let me leave it for later, maybe an inquisitive reader has more experience in this matter.

4. Launching application software: games

Well, where without them. On MSX there were a lot of games, both developed for it, and ported from other platforms. I have always been little interested in games, but one toy still caught me, then, 15 years ago, so much so that I went through it with interest to the end.

I still did not remember the name to this day, but the plot: we fly in a helicopter, release the prisoners from the barracks, simultaneously killing the enemies. And the title was something like Coper ... I found it in the junk archives for MSX . It is called "Coplifter." The game is packed with the LHA archive, put it in our disk folder and unpack it. Inside there will be two binaries and a “script” on the choplift.bas basic to start the game

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

The Basic interpreter

starts , and after it the game: The encouraging beginning ...


... it itself is - Choplifter !!!


The emulator "eats" and ROMs with games, of which, according to the link that has already been repeatedly clicked. Many rum googles - I first launched the same helicopter from rum, and only then I figured out the archive and the launch from under dos.

Instead of an epilogue

Perhaps the article turned out to be more emotional than practical. A date with childhood, it is. There are a lot of unresolved questions about working with the emulator - the same pascal is now haunting me. But this is not a matter of one day in the presence of free time.

Somewhere in the early 2000s, after I graduated from high school, an IBM PC was bought in a computer class on a stump with Windows 98 SE on board. "Yamaha" sent to school a village near our district center. Floppy disks with my work left with them - a quest about a flight to Mars, “Sea Battle”, a simple DBMS written in pascal ... I would give expensive now for live diskettes with my FIRST FIRST programs.

PS:

Rummaging through the emulator and googling did find a normal pascal.
Only on YIS-805/128 dos, at least kill yourself when loading it, it turns on the 40x25 mode, in which the editor lines run into each other.

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

What we will see after starting the


Text Editor. Such was the IDE, and you’re all eclipse, yes silicone ...


Compilation into a COM file is a given for 8-bit machines, the processor is available for 64 Kb


Compilation into memory and execution


But still I would like to work in normal mode on KUVT, to save nostalgic mood. This is probably not the last article about OpenMSX ...