The name RAM doesn't make much sense in general for a memeory area because i.e. the zero page is for sure RAM but is not part of the memory area named RAM.
For disk based targets it makes sense to put the disk file more into focus and here MAIN means the main part of the file - in contrast to some header.
Only for ROM based targets the name RAM is kept as it makes sense to focus on the difference between RAM and ROM.
The way we want to use the INITBSS segment - and especially the fact that it won't have the type bss on all ROM based targets - means that the name INITBSS is misleading. After all INIT is the best name from my perspective as it serves several purposes and therefore needs a rather generic name.
Unfortunately this means that the current INIT segment needs to be renamed too. Looking for a short (ideally 4 letter) name I came up with ONCE as it contains all code (and data) accessed only once during initialization.
Conceptually the INITBSS segment is not initialized in any way. Therefore it makes sense to not load it from disk. However the INIT segment has to be loaded from disk and therefore moved to its run location above the INITBSS segment. The necessary move routine increases runtime RAM usage :-(
Therefore we now "unnecessarily" load the INITBSS segment from disk too meaning that the INIT segment is loaded at its run location. Therefore there's no need for the move routine anymore.
After all we trade disk space for (runtime) RAM space - an easy decision ;-)
Notes:
- The code allowing to re-run a program without re-load present so far could not have worked as far as I can see as it only avoided to re-run the move routine but still tried to re-run the code in the INIT segment that was clobbered by zeroing the BSS. Therefore I removed the code in question altogether. I'm personally not into this "dirty re-run" but if someone wants to add an actually working solution I won't block that.
- INITBSS is intentionally not just merged with the DATA segment as ROM-based targets can't reuse the INIT segment for the BSS and therefore have no reason to place the INIT segment above INITBSS.
- Because ROM-based targets don't copy INITBSS from the ROM (like it is done with the DATA segment) all users of INITBSS _MUST_NOT_ presume INITBSS to be initialized with zeros!
Kym Greenshields <kym.greenshields@gmail.com> has expressed interest
in contributing and maintaining support for the VTech CreatiVision system.
this resembles commit 8e6b8dd0af from oliver
