New taka-nami proto5 with built-in flash rom brings new exciting features:
- Ultra high-speed access to bios and basic
- You can flash your own board version or use a customised image
- Easy tinkering with bios versions without hacking your main board
- Ultra-fast microsoft basic
To flash the built-in flash chip our friend Armando has provided great tools
In addition to the flash rom, the new taka-nami provides better compatibility with noisy msx boards. More msx classics can be upgraded now with taka-nami to full turbo speed and large ram.
As before, with taka-nami a classic msx gets:
- Full-speed 20 Mhz turbo, with control by external switch or keyboard
- 512 KByte of mapped ram that replaces our mainboard ram
- optional rtc emulation to use standard 2.0 or 3.0 roms (such as in svi 738 w/o rtc)
- F4 port to use 3.0 roms
Example things you can do by installing a taka-nami:
- Use msx dos tools at blazing speed in real hw
- Use an unmodified msx2 bios and 512 KByte of ram in an svi738
- Instantly repair an msx with bad dram(*)
- Play games in ram with srom at much much higher speed (funny) like Nemesis at 60 fps
* provided that dram chips are faulty but don't block the bus
Things that work at full turbo speed with taka-nami:
- Most ROM cartridges and msxdos/nextor tools such as sofa run
- Qualified mass storage devices such as Yamanooto
- All software that does not require exact timings to communicate with custom hardware. VDP and all standard hardware is accesible trouble free at 20 MHz
Things that DON’T work (but you can continue using disabling turbo either with a keystroke or a physical switch):
- Some fpga cartridges that require exact timings, specially when used in some noisy msx models
- Some storage drivers that use the cpu speed to calculate timings for hardware access. That includes most built-in floppy controllers
A lot of work has been done to improve the compatibility with built-in floppy controllers and external devices, but some may or may not work for you depending of your main board and/or expansion firmware version.
If you’re developing a storage solution, I encourage you to apply simple patches to not relay on cpu speed. We offer help for everyone involved.
Taka-nami manual
Taka-nami repository