AfA OS in ROM?

[AndrewBell]

The Kickflash can be upgraded to 1GB if Jens ever gets off his backside and makes the expansion he promised.
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VAPORIZER REVIEW

[motorollin]

I have asked Jens about the flash upgrade. I wonder how difficult it would be to make one?

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moto

[AndrewBell]

motorollin wrote:
I have asked Jens about the flash upgrade. I wonder how difficult it would be to make one?

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moto

That depends entirely on what he had in mind. It might just be an adapter for a CF card, or it might be more complicated.
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Video review

[Piru]

I'm afraid you cannot compress resident modules with PowerPacker. The OS locates the residents by scanning for an ID inside the executable (RTF_MATCHWORD + ptr to self), and if compressed that ID cannot be found.

PowerPacker only supports packed libraries/devices if dos/LoadSeg is patched to decompress the compressed files on the fly. This also means that only disk based compression is supported.

To my knowledge Imploder has some level of support for "self contained" library/device crunching, but even with Imploded libraries/devices it is questionable if they'd work from within read only memory.

[motorollin]

Thanks Piru. I will give Imploder a try. I see your point about potential problems with using them in read only memory. I suppose the question is whether the KickFlash copies the files to Fast RAM before doing anything with them, or whether it patches something to use them directly from the KickFlash itself. I'll try it anyway.

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moto

[motorollin]

According to the Imploder manual, pure programmes which are "normal" imploded (the exploding code is included in the executable, like PowerPacker), the programme is no longer pure. So that's no good.

It also says that pure programmes can be "library" imploded (the exploding code is held in exploder.library). If I library implode the AfA modules and write them, along with exploder.library, will exploder.library be resident, allowing the AfA modules to be exploded?

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moto

[Doobrey]

I've just had a quick look at the afa 3.96 archive, and the only system lib to have a resident tag appears to be exec_lib.exe (and even that looks wrong, rt_EndSkip points back before the romtag).
 

[motorollin]

What does that mean? There's no hope for inserting them in to the KickFlash?

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moto

[Doobrey]

Without a resident tag (+init code) they'll just sit there taking up memory, exec won't be able to find them so the patches will never get executed. :-(

[motorollin]

I see. I have fed that information in to my brain, and it has told me that this probably means that the resident tag makes the executable say "I'm here", and that exec then looks for resident tags to see who is there ready to be executed. Is my brain correct?

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moto

[Doobrey]

Yep, that's pretty much what it does.
It's just a structure that describes what the code is (device,library,resource etc), what version it is, if it should be automatically run (and its priority says when it should be run), and a name and ID string.

Chris Hodges describes it a lot better than I ever could in the docs to  Luciferin

[motorollin]

Thanks for looking in to it. It's a real shame it won't work. Maybe in a future revision of AfA.

Cheers

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moto