I got bitten again, I've over-designed my solution. The last time
it happened, it was that memory mapping thing I was wanting to add.
The indirect memory access feature I was adding was to solve a
specific problem: Allow Collapse OS to cross-compile directly on a
AT28 EEPROM.
It began well. As long as we were staying in the assembler realm,
things were looking good. However, when we got into the xcomp realm
(B260), things became ugly, and I had to creep up indirection where
I didn't want to.
All of this because I wanted to solve my initial problem in a
slightly more generalized way. The broad idea was that these indirect
memory access could allow xcomp into a broad kind of memory-like
devices.
This idea broke on the "@" part of the equation. If I want
indirections to be two-way and allow xcomp to work properly, I have
to add this indirection to FIND (and possibly others) and this just
isn't practical or elegant.
So, I'm taking a step back and accepting that the solution I design
for now is exclusively for the AT28. What I'm thinking is to add a
low-level hook for memory writing, at the assembly level.
Also, rename "Addressed devices" to "Indirect memory access".
I do this because I need to add indirect versions of !, @ and ,
to allow boostrapping directly to EEPROM and that A,, thing I've
added to assemblers felt like really bad names.
With this change, I'd like to generalize the use of the * suffix
for aliases.
Working in "blk/" folder from a modern system is harder than it
should be. Moving blocks around is a bit awkward, grepping is a
bit less convenient than it could be, git blame has troubles
following, etc.
In this commit, we modify blkpack and blkunpack to work with single
text files with blocks being separated by a special markup.
I think this will make the code significantly more convenient to
work into.
Running a ROM on an everdrive is one thing, but running a ROM
directly is another: my hacked up sega.bin didn't have a proper
checksum, so the ROM didn't run.
This new tool transforms a binary into a properly-headered ROM.
Has been tested on an actual SMS.
By default, it changes nothing, but it allows interesting
setups, such as using AT28! for directly uploading to EEPROM.
I've also updated the EEPROM recipe to upload directly to 0x2000.
I'm not sure what has changed, but it's working fine now.
Previously, it could never write more than a few bytes before pingpong
getting a mismatch error. Now, I can pingpong Collapse OS binary
without a mismatch.
So far, I hadn't managed to run those tools properly on OpenBSD. I
was too confused by its stty peculiarities. I'm still confused, but
at least I managed to make them work... most of the time...
The man page says it's not always available and it caused problems
under some FSes. The condition is not needed in the context of
blk/, let's scrap it.
`xxd' is not available on all systems, and on others does not support
the `-i' flag. Since bin2c.sh relied on a tool that I can't seem to find
a compatible version of, I have included a simple, portable replacement in C.
Usage remains the same:
bin2c ARRAYNAME < inputfile > outputfile.
This change is also reflected in emul/Makefile.
Sending the escape after its target made things complicated for upcoming
stuff I want to add. Although it makes `recv.asm` slightly larger, it's really
worth it.
