Compile Cartridge ROM configuration about fastbasic

[dmsc]

Hi!

I am working on compiling a program and seeing if it is possible to make a program run from a 16k cartridge instead of RAM. I have started a CFG file. I am not sure if I am not missing anything.

This needs a little extra work.

Normally, Fastbasic uses self-modifying-code in a few places to make the code faster, so the code can't be placed in ROM. But there is a compilation option to use alternative code that disables this, so you need to recompile the interpreter.

As I had not tested that option in a while, I just reviewed all the interpreter and found three places which still tried to write to the code, so I just fixed that.

This means:

• You need the last (unreleased) version from github.
• You need to compile the code using:

  make ASMFLAGS="--asm-define NO_SMCODE"

• You need to alter the linker file.

Here there is another little issue: Fastbasic uses code in zeropage and initialized DATA.

This means you need to provide two special sections:

• A section to place the "INTERP" segment in ROM, and at runtime copy it to RAM.
• A section to place the "RT_DATA" segment in TOM, and again at runtime copy it to RAM.

I added a "fastbiasc-cart.cfg" file with those sections, and the support code to build the cartridge image in commit b8d7ff6 , now the full instructions to compile for a cartridge image (on Linux or other Unix) are:

  git clone https://github.com/dmsc/fastbasic/
  cd fastbasic
  make ASMFLAGS="--asm-define NO_SMCODE"
  build/compiler/fb myProgram.bas -C:build/compiler/fastbasic-cart.cfg

Have Fun!

I also have a ML routine called deflate which decompresses data blocks from Cartridge ROM into RAM. I could just use a portion of cartridge ROM for fonts, data tables, and some ML routines.

[dmsc]

Hi!

I also have a ML routine called deflate which decompresses data blocks from Cartridge ROM into RAM. I could just use a portion of cartridge ROM for fonts, data tables, and some ML routines.

Did you try using the new CART support?

Also I recently added a copy of the CC65 tools to the repo, so you don't need CC65 to use the compiler.

Have Fun!