fMSX Amiga 1.4

TITLE

fMSX Amiga 1.4

AUTHOR

Hans Guijt (h.guijt@inter.nl.net)

DESCRIPTION

fMSX Amiga emulates an MSX computer on an Amiga. Features include:

- Full emulation of the MSX1 system.
- Fair emulation of the MSX2 system.
- Support for reading/writing MSX disks and disk images.
- Can play all types of MSX ROMs, including ROMs bigger than 32KB.
- Support for the PSG, SCC, and SCC+ sound chips (through AHI or native).
- Support for MSX memory sizes of up to 4Mb.
- Can be controlled through ARexx.

'MSX' is an 8-bit computer system with surprisingly good graphics and sound
capabilities.  How does graphic resolutions of up to 512 * 424, up to 256
colors on screen, and 9 channel music sound?

To demonstrate, several MSX pictures (taken from fMSX while running) have
been uploaded to aminet (pix/illu/msx_emu.lha).

Software is not included with the package, but many packages (mostly games)
can be found on FTP sites:

ftp.saitama-u.ac.jp/pub/msx/
altair.komkon.com/pub/MSX/
ftp.funet.fi/pub/msx/
riaph.irkutsk.su/pub/

Hundreds of games are available from these sites, and some form a worthy
addition to the Amiga software collection.

Of course fMSX Amiga is fully multitasking, runs in an intuition screen,
and has a font-sensitive user interface.

NEW FEATURES

Most of the VDP (the MSX2 blitter) was rewritten in assembly.  This speeds
MSX2 games up enormeously and removes many of the crashes that previous
versions of fMSX suffered when running MSX2 games.  Of the 101 megaROMs
that were tested 80 worked fine!

At last, AHI support was added to fMSX.  Now you can listen to the full
musical scores of classic Konami games such as Nemesis 2 or 3, Salamander,
F1 Spirit, Gryzor, or Metal Gear 2.  Because of the way AHI works a fast
processor is recommended, though.  Of course the old style sound emulation
is still supported.

Line interrupts were added to the screen 5 emulation.  This makes it
possible to play games such as Aleste (recommended!), Zanac-Ex, Quarth, and
Ashguine 2.

fMSX can now be controlled through an ARexx port!  Example scripts and
relevant documentation are included.

Other new features include less aggressive blitting and user-selectable
double buffering (both good for CyberGfx owners), slightly rewritten
highspeed mode (it should work fine on ECS now), and a host of minor
bugfixes and features.

As a special gimmick fMSX allows you to change the font used by the MSX. 
Several fonts are included in the package.

SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS

Required are:

- AmigaOS 2.0
- 68020 processor
- 350 kilobytes chip ram
- 1000 kilobytes other ram

Recommended:

- AmigaOS 3.0
- 68030 processor, at least 25MHz
- Those 1000 kilobytes of 'other' ram had better be fast ram!

Note that fMSX Amiga does *not* require the AGA chipset.  In fact it runs
on any chipset upto and including graphics cards!

AVAILABILITY

fMSX Amiga 1.4 is available from any aminet site, such as:

ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/misc/emu/fmsx_1.4.lha

PRICE

It's free.

DISTRIBUTABILITY

fMSX Amiga 1.4 is publically supported freeware.  If you are interested in
the source, and you're not afraid of function pointers and huge amounts of
assembly mixed with C, you can request it from me.

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