Today we have published the first beta of the built-in Nextor with driver for a native SD-Card module.
This is a major achievement by our friend and tester Armando, who developed the driver in his Tides-Rider while testing it at turbo speed 20 Mhz!
In addition to provide great speed, it leaves both expansion slots free while booting using the built-in megarom mapper and the Nextor image in the flash rom.
The micro SD-Card slot is mounted in a small module which plugs in the video expansion connector. It supports both MicroSD and MicroSDHC cards
How it works?
The capability of booting from a mass storage device is planned since we allocated a slot in the Tides-Rider memory map with ASCII16 for Nextor.
Previously, the built-in Nextor could be used with legacy disk controllers which have a dos1 kernel, allowing you to boot these controllers in dos2 mode with a disk including suitable files (NEXTOR.SYS or MSXDOS2.SYS).
Now that a native (Nextor native) driver is added, you can get a modern micro-sd controller to work with Nextor providing great speed and convenient micro-sd media like other known modern mass storage solutions for MSX. As this functionality is provided by the internally expanded slot 3, all physical slots in the Tider-Rider remain free to use with classic or dma cartridges!
How to upgrade?
The upgrade requires both a software upgrade of the Nextor image (in the main flash rom) and the micro-sd slot module.
- Current nextor image with the micro-sd driver can be downloaded from our repository.
- To obtain the micro-sd slot module, contact miguel at genami.shop by email, as we are not providing it as a separate item.
Update: We have an update tool to flash from msxdos: Romeo