MSX WBrowser

العربية

A minimal HTML browser for the MSX2, written in Z80 assembly. Runs as an MSX-DOS 1 .COM program on Screen 6 (512×212, 4 colours) and renders plain HTML files from a floppy disk, with Arabic shaping, lam-alef ligatures, and basic bidirectional text support.

Features

• Screen-6 chrome — title bar, back/forward/refresh toolbar, address bar, scrollable content area, and a pixel-aligned scrollbar.
• HTML subset — <h1>–<h6>, <p>, <b>, <i>, <u>, <s>, <font color>, <a href>, <center>, <hr>, <br>, <pre>, <ul>/<ol>/<li>, <blockquote>, <table>/<tr>/<td>/<th>,  /&/</>/" entities.
• Images — <img src="..." alt="..."> loads bitmap assets from the same disk. Supported formats:
  • .sc6 — MSX Screen-6 BSAVE dump. Use tools/png_to_sc6.py (with optional -c to centre-pad narrow logos) to convert PNG/BMP artwork into a browser-ready SC6 file.
  • .pcx — ZSoft PCX at 2 bpp / 1 plane (RLE encoded).
  • .bmp — uncompressed Windows BMP at 4 bpp (16-colour palette) or 24 bpp; luminance-quantised onto the 4-colour Screen-6 palette.
  • Inline data:msx;base64,… payloads produced by tools/img_encode/img_encode.py.
  • Unsupported formats or missing files fall back to [alt] / [img] inline text.
• Arabic — ISO-8859-6 input, joining-form shaping (isolated / initial / medial / final), lam-alef ligatures, Arabic-Indic digits.
• BiDi (L2) — multi-word Arabic runs reorder correctly inside left-to-right paragraphs; dir="rtl" flips paragraph direction.
• Alignment — align="left|right|center" on block tags.
• Keyboard & mouse — Tab navigation, Enter/Space activation, arrow and Page keys for scrolling, mouse click through direct PSG reads.

Layout

src/mwbrowser.asm        main source
src/iso8859_6.inc        generated ISO-8859-6 → glyph + joining table
dist/mwbrowser.com       assembled binary (Screen-6 .COM)

Building

Requires asMSX and mtools (for the MSX-DOS disk injection).

./tools/build.sh          # assembles src/mwbrowser.asm → dist/mwbrowser.com
./tools/inject.sh         # writes dist/mwbrowser.com into the boot disk
./tools/run.sh            # launches openMSX with the disk inserted

From the MSX-DOS prompt:

A> mwbrowsr

Type a filename in the address bar (e.g. a:\test.htm) and press Enter.

Keyboard

Key	Action
Tab / Shift+Tab	Cycle focus
Enter / Space	Activate focused button / link
Arrow keys	Scroll / move focus
Space, M	Page down
B	Page up
F1	About
Esc	Close dialog / quit

License

All rights reserved. This is a private research project.