Some of you have questions about the nowind interface, and since our own forum seems to be dead as a doornail, we decided to take wolf_'s advice and open a Support thread here..

Any questions, suggestions or feature requests can be made here...

greetings,

Jan

Jan,

How come that I ordered a Nowind on 12-06-2008 and I recieved a confirmation mail, I never got the payment info ?
So now i'm probably to late to finish up the order to receive a Nowind Interface

- Which disk.rom are you using in msxsrc?
- I've tried to flash the firmware with usbhost, it just sat waiting at "Send erase command to flash....". Nothing happened, tried it on 2 different MSXes. Is it a bug in the utility? The device works fine as far as I can tell, eg. usbhost.exe blah.dsk

hap:
It doesn't really happen what disk.rom you use, because the parts that are included are common to most diskroms.
We know 8245 and 8250/55 roms work fine, but I expect almost any other diskrom to work aswell. (ok, maybe not sony or 2+ roms, never tested those)

You have to hold "F" (as it says on the very limited doc-page www.myquest.nl/nowindusb/?q=node/6) at boot to put the nowind interface
in boot mode _before_ you start usbhost -f <firmware.rom>. As far as we know firmware flashing works fine.
The "Send erase command to flash...." should take about 5-10 seconds, and then it should start flashing.

Holding "F" worked
What's a stable msxsrc SVN revision? I tried assembling+flashing nowindDos1.asm with the 8250 disk.rom (and with or without DEBUG/DEVICEHANDLER), newest revision and one from 2 weeks ago, but everytime i did "files" I got garbage (to be specific, chr$(255)+"."+space) -- no problem with http://www.myquest.nl/nowindusb/files/nowind_firmware.rom

The head revision is stable, you should disable DEBUG because that only work in an emulator (although it should work even with DEBUG on, it just costs some space. You shouldn't use nowindDos1.asm, it's quite old and uses an older protocol version, we should have (and will) remove it.

use Sjasm 4 home.wanadoo.nl/smastijn/sjasm.html to compile nowindnew.asm I've added a new part about compiing the firmware in the download section.

ok, got it working

Hi, three question. I've a original phonola (the philips clone) msx2 nms8245. the machine have a built-in floppy drive. If i plug the nowind interface on the computer:

1) Can i see the new drive as B: ?
2) Do i need to remove the original disk rom and solder a patched version? and in this case i see the nowind as a: right?
3) Is there a way to avoid to do intervents on the original hardware (eprom pathing) and use nowind interface as a disk drive ?

Thanks.

1) if you have one internal diskdrive and you insert the nowind interface, it will assign itself to a:, if the romdisk is enabled it will be b: and the original internal drive will become c:
2) there is no need to do any (hardware) patching, any drive assignment changes can be done in software. (currently there is no user-feature for this)
3) If i understand you correctly, this is the default behaviour of the nowind interface

Quote:

1) if you have one internal diskdrive and you insert the nowind interface, it will assign itself to a:, if the romdisk is enabled it will be b: and the original internal drive will become c: 2) there is no need to do any (hardware) patching, any drive assignment changes can be done in software. (currently there is no user-feature for this) 3) If i understand you correctly, this is the default behaviour of the nowind interface

This sound fine !
Even if i do not realize how works these drive assignements on msx.
Another thing that is obscure to me is how can the dos or basic automatically hook the nowind bios when i do something like LOAD "A:myprog.bas",r.....

However the first important thing, the possibility to replace the A drive with the nowind one, without hw changes, work, if i understood correctly.... thx

I think it's hooked when the BIOS is initialized. The BIOS just goes from slot to slot initializing every disk ROM it finds. IIRC the drive letter is determined by the order in which the disk ROMs are initialized, lowest slot number having the 'lowest' drive letter, so as long as your disk ROM is not in slot 0 nowind should indeed be drive A.

thx, Sonic. I need some more in-depth knowledge about bios workings, there is some source where i can find things about rom initialization, new devices etc..?

I got most of my (limited) knowledge from Dutch MSX magazines (mostly MCM). I suppose there must've been some Spanish mag with technical articles too, right? Alternatively you could also have a look at the MSX red/green/blue/whatever Book, but that one is a bit of a boring read. IIRC the MSX-DOS2 tech doc had some info on this type of thing too, but I could be wrong. Anyhoo, the standard documentation has most of this info, it's just not very phun to read. All you really need to know about the BIOS is how to page it out tho...

My nowind college Aaldert has good working knowlegde of how this works, I will ask him to explain this on the documentation page of the nowind website

Quote:

My nowind college Aaldert has good working knowlegde of how this works, I will ask him to explain this on the documentation page of the nowind website

Would be good!