Whoa, things got technical in my absence. To think all of this stemmed from OPs desire to play an MSX game. Unfortunately as I expected, smushing floppies together has produced an unusable rom. Perhaps it would be possible to do if we could extract all the assets on the floppies, get rid of duplicate stuff, cobble everything else together and carefully construct a ROM that way. This is not only a long shot in theory but in practice it would require access to source code since we'd have to rewrite quite a bit of it. Catch all the pointers and jumps to sectors/addresses and redirect them to their new locations in our Frankenstein's ROM. That's all assuming the resulting data could be crammed and compressed into 512Kb to begin with. I'm no programmer, my understanding is layman's at best and ignoramus's at worst so chances are I'm barely half-correct in my assumptions but it looks like a herculean task either way.
The game does offer an option to install so I thought that maybe we could try and make an installation to a virtual HDD and then share that the same way most PC-98 games are distributed on the Internet but I'm not gonna lie, the scant few descriptions I found on how to even attempt such a thing were way too dense for me; I couldn't make heads or tails of any of it.
So I figured that a difference in approach is in order. The whole thread exists because OpenMSX is touted as the best MSX emulator out there. Maybe it's true, I have no idea, but the problem is that that the freeware BIOS you get with it is incapable of playing floppies. Maybe instead of wrestling with the floppies I could wrangle the emulator itself. And boy, did I ever wrangle that thing. In order to make full use of OpenMSX's capabilities you need a system ROM package which you can find
in this thread. I wasn't entirely sure where I was supposed to put the files but the emulator is uncharacteristically helpful in that regard. If you go to Machine->Test MSX Hardware->Open system wide ROMs folder it will point you exactly where it wants those ROMs. After that you can test hardware again to make sure everything's OK. Don't worry about some things listed as not working - I still have 2 extensions listed as not working but that seems inconsequential. Now we need to pick a machine that supports floppies. Go to Machine->Select MSX machine. Seeing as Snatcher is a game released well into the life of the MSX line of computers I picked 'openMSX Team Boosted MSX2+ JP' though I assume quite a few other models will be up to the task as well. Once you've found your machine click 'Replace current machine' and you're pretty much done there. There will be a new button 'Make this the default machine' above the list and filters which you can click just so you don't have to repeat the procedure every time you fire up OpenMSX. Once you're done with all of that you can just go Media->Disk Drive A and find your floppy. I played the game for a few minutes and by the looks of it Disk0 serves as a boot disk and Disk1 is the intro. After you get to Disk2 you should be free from having to swap floppies for a while. One final tip. The game can be really slow. F9 toggles fast forward. Enjoy.
Oof, this developed into an unexpected wall of text. I know this isn't exactly what you wanted,
@5thWolf but a man's gotta know his limitations sometimes. If someone figures out how to make an MSX HDD and install Snatcher onto it then that would be great but considering there are no images of such nature floating around on the web (or at least I couldn't find one) I assume that it's either excruciatingly hard or downright impossible.
