What is it?

This is the interface for controlling IDE devices. IDE was the hard drive connection standard born in the PC-AT era and eventually found its way into DVD players and other mass storage devices until it was recently replaced by the SATA standard (by then we already had Pentium 4).

So it's an interface with a lot of possibilities because it allows you to connect a lot of different devices as long as MSX has the right driver for that device.

Why did you make it?

This card, this interface, this cartridge, was created and improved by multiple people, the documentation is so scattered it's hard to keep track of everyone, please forgive me if anyone is left in the dark.

We thank the SUNRISE team for the original design of the SUNRISE IDE box, Henrik Gilvad for the PCB design, and Jon de Shcrijder, Taburoto and Solrak_dfk for their continuous improvements.

We thank Néstor Soriano (aka Konamiman) for his selfless and hard work in creating the Nextor OS.

We also thank its creators for developing several utilities for msx-dos2 and Windows used in this tutorial.

What makes it special?

When MSX was born, having hard drive support was an almost unimaginable luxury, but today, in the Gigas (or Teras) vortex we live in, all that's left are low-capacity hard drives that someone is trying to get rid of.

This is a very cheap interface and easy to build, allowing access from our MSX to multiple operating systems and all the benefits associated with them.

Of course, storing a program on a hard disk is much faster than storing it on a floppy disk (not to mention a magnetic tape), and if we use a compact flash device, it will be faster, more convenient, lighter and quieter. This means adding modern solid state drive technology to our 8-bit computers, just like in other cases we are preparing a kit to make assembly easier for you. The kit will contain a compact flash adapter and a memory card.

Having a hard drive will allow us to access various operating systems, the first being Nextor, msx-dos2 and symbOS, but we will certainly see many others later on.