MDPC (Mega Drive Personal Computer)

Unidentified Assilant · Sat Mar 26, 2005 9:20 am

Very ambitious I know... I have some spare parts left off from a computer, and decided on something that may be possible, a personal computer created out of a megadrive (not like the Mini-ITX project), with a 3.5" Floppy Disk Drive and possibly a 4GB Hard Drive, with hopefully an OS. Last question, You may laugh at this but can Windows 3.1 or MacOS be ported to Megadrive?

Post by **Sparkfist** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 10:19 am

Sounds like you want to make a Taradrive. It was a computer marketed only in Japan by IBM and had a Genesis/Mega Drive in it. The thing is, it didnt support playing games from the Computer OS, you had to flip an external switch to move from Computer to Genesis.

Post by **gannon** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 11:29 am

try devster

Post by **Sparkfist** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 12:02 pm

If you want to see about running an OS like Mac on it you'll be doing some really work on it. The Genesis (or Mega Drive to you) only has 64kb ram (if you throw in the Sega CD its closer to 1mb), the only Macs that ran with that low of ram were the Mac 128 and 512. Also if you wanted audio you'd have to install drivers to use the Z80 chip. This will require a lot of coding and over hauling of the OS.

Winodws 3.1. I dont see that happening. I dont think that version ran on anything but 386 (or 4) systems. You can try and get FreeDOS and see about getting that to run on it, after all DOS is only command line so the requirements are really low.

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 4:37 pm

Sparkfist wrote:Sounds like you want to make a Taradrive. It was a computer marketed only in Japan by IBM and had a Genesis/Mega Drive in it. The thing is, it didnt support playing games from the Computer OS, you had to flip an external switch to move from Computer to Genesis.

You're confusing the IBM Tera Drive with the Amstrad Mega PC. With the Amstrad you couldn't use the Genesis portion and the PC at the same time, and had to physically switch which side was engaged. The IBM Tera Drive, on the other hand, could use both at the same time, one of the games for it had a level designer on PC, then run the game from the Genesis.

You can try and get FreeDOS and see about getting that to run on it, after all DOS is only command line so the requirements are really low.

DOS uses an x86 processor, it's not going to work on the 68K processor in a Genesis. (you could get the command line working by recompiling FreeDOS, pending it's all coded in C, but then you couldn't run programs on it)

System for Mac might actually work, as Macs use 68K processors too. You'll still need to do everything Sparkfist mentioned to get it working though.

Post by **Triton** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 5:31 pm

you could probably use an early version of Amiga OS too, it ran on 68xxx with i think 512k of ram (possibly less) might be worth looking into

Post by **Sparkfist** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 6:10 pm

DOS ran on 6502 processors I beleive it can run on a 16bit and has as many of the early macs (LC to be more specific) offered the ability to run DOS. However the LC used 68030 or 68040 CPUs.

If you have good coding skills you can also look at NetBSD.org. They have a couple ports that run on 68k, I'm not sure if you can get them to run on a 68000, but its worth looking at.

You can also replace the 68000 CPU in the Genesis with a 68010. Its known to be incompatable with some games but will make it easier to run an OS on it.

Unidentified Assilant · Sun Mar 27, 2005 8:12 am

How about Amiga Workbench? The Amiga 1200 used a motorola 68000 processor

Post by **Sparkfist** » Sun Mar 27, 2005 10:15 am

Well fine you have a list that will work with the main CPU now you need to see about the possiblity of writting drives to work with the other hardware.
Like: Z80
The VDP (video display processor)
Other sound processors (genesis seems to have another and the Sega CD has one its own)

Also make note that unless CD-rom speed is dependent on the system you wont get anymore then 1x (150kb/s). So if you have to load the OS everytime into ram it may take a bit.

Post by **gannon** » Sun Mar 27, 2005 10:22 am

Check out this demo.
This looks pretty good aswell.
Contiki would be another one, but I don't think it's been ported yet.

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Sun Mar 27, 2005 1:46 pm

Sparkfist wrote:DOS ran on 6502 processors I beleive it can run on a 16bit and has as many of the early macs (LC to be more specific) offered the ability to run DOS. However the LC used 68030 or 68040 CPUs.

Err, sorry, I thought you were talking about MS DOS or PC DOS, not Apple's Pro-DOS. Not familiar with it as much MS/PC DOS, but you'd likely need to write drivers for it too. Last I checked though, FreeDOS was only for x86, and was MS DOS compatable.

Triton wrote:you could probably use an early version of Amiga OS too, it ran on 68xxx with i think 512k of ram (possibly less) might be worth looking into

Unidentified Assilant wrote:How about Amiga Workbench? The Amiga 1200 used a motorola 68000 processor

The Amiga used a lot of custom chips, which is why the machine is so versitile and fast, so it's not going to work on Genesis.

Sparkfist wrote:Like: Z80
The VDP (video display processor)
Other sound processors (genesis seems to have another and the Sega CD has one its own)

TRS-DOS on a Genesis' Z80 would be interesting...

Sparkfist wrote:If you have good coding skills you can also look at NetBSD.org. They have a couple ports that run on 68k, I'm not sure if you can get them to run on a 68000, but its worth looking at.

You'd have to have insane coding skills to pull anything mentioned so far off. But, yeah, an open source OS would be your best best.

Unidentified Assilant · Mon Mar 28, 2005 3:17 am

Gannon, whats the website for that 68KE demo?

nos_slived · Post by **nos_slived** » Mon Mar 28, 2005 3:23 am

Why is this on the SNES forum?

Unidentified Assilant · Mon Mar 28, 2005 4:56 am

Both Megadrive and SNES are 16-bit consoles, and theres a lot of spam on this forum, anybody should agree Megadrive deserves a place on this forum.

Post by **gannon** » Mon Mar 28, 2005 12:07 pm

I only have the link to the demo, I found it on a rom site. http://mipagina.cantv.net/tomman/romz/win68k.rar