Standardizing drive letter assignment regardless of disk rom location

[sdsnatcher73]

On machines with built in disk-drives where the disk rom is in slot 0 (e.g. Sony HB-G900P) the floppy drives will become A: and B: and the first Nextor drive will be C: (system will sill boot from C:). The same would happen if a machine had no internal disk drives but an external disk drive was inserted into slot 1 and nextor in slot 2. On machines where the disk rom is in a higher slot, nextor will assign it's drive from A: and disk drives will become C: and D:.

I think it would be good if Nextor would always let the DiskROM initialize first (and let disk drives be A: and B:) and Nextor drives become C: onwards. I believe this could be accomplished by having Nextor hook into H.STKE on boot and let the disk rom initialize prior to Nextor, regardless if it is in a lower or higher slot.

What needs to be considered also is what if there are no internal disk drives? Should Nextor start from A: or still use C:, my vote would be to keep it on C: in such a case as well.

Of course this is just an/my opinion but it would make behavior more consistent across different MSX machines and also bring it in line how PC's behave with MS-DOS (and onwards).

[sdsnatcher73]

I think this way one could also still boot from floppy when a Nextor based device is inserted, also in line with how things works on PC (although that currently does not work on HB-G900P, actually machine won't boot from floppy or Nextor if a floppy is inserted on such a machine)

[sdsnatcher73]

An alternative solution (at least it introduces the same consistency) is to reinitialize the FDD within Nextor. MMCSD does this when it detects an already initialized FDD so on HB-F500 MMCSD will still take A: drive (since version 5.50 of the firmware).

[sdsnatcher73]