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DIVMMC

The DicMCC became the most used interface to run software from an SD card.

On display we have one of Dutch’s Ben Versteeg’s ByteDelight versions and, evem more relevant from an historical point of view, we have the first DivMMC model, developed by Mário Prato. This specimen was given to us with permission from Mário Prato* himself, and was donated by Miguel Guerreiro, esxDOS’** Portuguese developer.

*Mário Prato:

  • Born in 1970, in Brindisi, South Italy.
  • An electronics’ technician working for ENEA (Agenzia Nazionale per le Nuove Tecnologie, l’Energia e lo Sviluppo Economico Sostenible – Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development).
  • Received his first ZX Spectrum 48K on Christmas, 1984, as a gift from his father, and after that he never let go of that computer or this field of knowledge.
  • He began building a clone called Chrome, in 2003, when a friend of his gave him some Xilinx equipment to programme. The Chrome had a floppy disk interface, but Mário wanted to explore something much more powerful for the mass storage.
  • In 2013, after talks with Alessandro Dorigatti and Miguel Guerreiro, he began developing a new interface, made specifically for Spectrum, and that was able to read data from an SD card, through Miguel’s esxDOS software. He created 12 original boards and, after that and since the scheme and code are available to everyone, thousands more boards have been assembled by many people.

**esxDOS

  • The most used software nowadays that allows for the DivMMC to work is called esxDOS, and was developed by Miguel Guerreiro. It is a modular system that works both with the DivIDE and the DivMMC.
  • The first beta version was released in 2005. The first stable version – v.0.8.0 – was released in 2021, having been finished whilst Miguel was fighting of Malaria.