[Coco] .BIN to .ROM

[Mark Marlette]

Chad,

As many others have suggested, this is not easy, especially at load time. I hate to say impossible but at load time...uffffddddddaaa.

Now loading a .ROM from a SD is easy, easier, depending your experience level.

SuperSD has a ROM emulator in it that does this. What is does require is a great understanding of your target hardware. I am using a uC to be the smarts and move things around as a CoCo is WAY to slow to do a SPI xfer.  The SuperSD is transferring a meg of data in under 1.8seconds currently. Your level of slowness tolerance is up to you. A CoCo can do SPI through a PIA and will take ~3 minutes to do what the SuperSD is doing in less than 1.8seconds. Then add all the other options that the SuperSD is doing, all off loading from the CoCo to let it focus on CoCo tasks.

IIRC, we load a 8K ROM in under 40mS, it will loaded before the coco even boots, yes the uC controls the CoCo's boot and won't allow it to come out of reset till the ROMs are loaded.

Fun stuff.


Regards,

Mark
http://www.cloud9tech.com



________________________________
 From: Chad H <chadbh74 at hotmail.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com> 
Sent: Tuesday, December 24, 2013 10:01 AM
Subject: Re: [Coco] .BIN to .ROM
 

Trying to be able to take any .BIN and flash it to EPROM.  Wish I had a 'bootloader' I could attach to the front of the .BIN data that would mimic the CLOADM and handle the .BIN data appropriately, then execute.

Sent from my Transformer Infinity

Steve <6809er at srbsoftware.com> wrote:

Chad,

As you learned from the replies, converting a .BIN file to .ROM files is
not easy.  Besides re-write the code to live in a new address space,
there is the fact that .BIN loads data in blocks all over the place.
The header for each block of data contains the address to load and the
size of the block.

Programmers have used this segmented loading of data to write to the
Video Memory and systems vectors alone with the programs data it's
self.  So converting this segmented loading format to a simple one
blocks load of the .ROM format is way there are two formats in the first
place.

I do have a question for you, Why do you want to convert a .BIN
formatted files into the .ROM format in the first place?  It was not
clear in your first message.  Knowing the reason may help us understand
your problem and come up with a solution for you.

Steve

On 12/23/2013 4:30 PM, Chad H wrote:
> Can someone please advise a simple and reliable method to convert a .BIN
> file to a .ROM file?  I can extract the .BIN on my PC if need be.   I seem
> to recall a ROM extraction function in the RETRIEVE.EXE included with the
> CoCo 2 emulator I have that was used for extracting the CoCo ROM to a DISK,
> then you use the RETRIEVE to grab the ROM data off the floppy into a  .ROM
> file on the PC.  I doubt this would work for many .BIN files though,
> especially since many don't start at &HC000.
>


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