I am glad to have taken a little rest from coding CBM Flux Studio in order to put together a public release of my Mindscape protection installer tool for Zaxxon.
All files are available in my new GitHub repository mindscape-protection-installer.
From the README.md file:
The tool is provided for research purposes only. It’s the end user’s responsibility to use it:
– in a way that does not infringe copyright laws and agreements still in effect, and
– only for personal purposes, without any intent to sell or distribute illegal clones of original software.
The repository also contains a tool I had to write in order to glue together assembly and BASIC code. It’s a nifty little tool named file2data
. What it does is to read a file and output CBM BASIC DATA
statements with its whole contents.
As an example, when the tool is pointed to the drive code binary that’s built as part of the overall project build, it produces something as per below:
700 lines=14:return
710 data 169, 4,133, 49, 32,143,247,169
720 data 0,141,190, 1,141,191, 1,141
730 data 192, 1,169,213,141,188, 1,169
740 data 170,141,193, 1,169,212,141,194
750 data 1, 32, 16,245,162, 8, 80,254
760 data 184,202,208,250,169,255,141, 3
770 data 28,173, 12, 28, 41, 31, 9,192
780 data 141, 12, 28,169,255,162, 5,141
790 data 1, 28,184, 80,254,184,202,208
800 data 250,160,187,185, 0, 1, 80,254
810 data 184,141, 1, 28,200,208,244,185
820 data 0, 4, 80,254,184,141, 1, 28
830 data 200,208,244, 80,254, 32, 0,254
840 data 230, 49,169, 1, 76,105,249, 0
The output can then be appended to a BASIC listing with a bit of code that reads in lines
worth of DATA
statements, each of which is made up of 8 values. The whole listing can then be converted to a PRG file using VICE emulator’s petcat
tool.
The next major activity I plan to go through is the refactoring of the track data display widget in CBM Flux Studio. The reason I am doing that now is that I want to modularize it as I will be writing a Hex Editor using the same modular approach 🙂
Stay tuned for more!