The MSX Red Book

Written by Avalon Software
Published by Kuma Computers, 1985.
ISBN: 0-7457-0178-7, 978-0-7457-0178-3

Description

"This book is about MSX computers and how they work. For technical and commercial reasons MSX computer manufacturers only make a limited amount of information available to the end user about the design of their machines. Usually this will be a fairly detailed description of Microsoft MSX BASIC together with a broad outline of the system hardware. While this level of documentation is adequate for the casual user it will inevitably prove limiting to anyone engaged in more sophisticated programming.

The aim of this book is to provide a description of the standard MSX hardware and software at a level of detail sufficient to satisfy that most demanding of users, the machine code programmer. It is not an introductory course on programming and is necessarily of a rather technical nature. It is assumed that you already possess, or intend to acquire by other means, an understanding of the Z80 Microprocessor at the machine code level. As there are so many general purpose books already in existence about the Z80 any description of its characteristics would simply duplicate widely available information."

-The MSX Red Book. Introduction.

Previous Plain Text release notes

The MSX Red Book (revised version 1997/08/06)

Notes from the editor:

• The book was scanned and converted (via O.C.R.) by one person and edited by another (using an IBM PC compatible), independently.
• All pages have a fix size of 64 lines. The width was not justified to make future modifications easier, though no line is longer than 80 columns.
• This book only covers standard MSX. The BIOS entry points from 0000H to 01B5H should be used instead of the called entries described in the book, because other machines (MSX2, MSX2+, MSX turbo R and customized ones) have different positions for the routines. The use of internal BIOS routine addresses are responsible for many programs only running in MSX.
• Some errors present in the original book were fixed, though it was tried to keep it as unaltered as possible. All page numbers match the originals, except undetected errors already present in the original.
• Most figures were modificated due to the text-only nature of this file. The character set used during edition was the International IBM PC's one. The following special characters were used and should be changed to the corresponding ones of other character sets:

Frame       +---+     Pound: £
characters: ¦ ¦ ¦     Micro: µ
            +-+-¦
            ¦ ¦ ¦
            +---+

Converted to ASCII format by MSXHans 2001

Disclaimer

I don't own the rights to this book. It has been long out of print but still is one of the most important sources of technical information about MSX 1 computers. My attempt is to improve the readability, accessibility and availability over the plain text version of this document. The book is not yet completely converted, it is still work in progress.

Feb. 2017