The Apple II hires screen buffer is located at $2000 (and can't be moved). The usual way to get along with this is to load the cc65 program above the hires screen buffer at $4000. However, that means that it becomes difficult to make good use of the memory below the hires screen buffer. The simplest approach is to add that memory to the heap. But there are programs containing just lots of code and not much data. One could think of moving the code to the area below the hires screen after loading (like it is done with the code for the language card). But if the program is really large (and already contains code to be moved to the language card) it won't just fit into memory in the first place.
The alternative is to load the program at the usual $803 and have it "cover" the hires screen buffer. Of course the part of the program that actually "covers" the hires screen buffer mustn't contain anything necessary for the program. The downside of this approach is that the program file on disk contains 8kB that can't be used by the program. But instead of just containing zeros the program can as well contain a hires screen picture that can be displayed right after startup.
Now the user can have code loaded below the hires screen buffer by setting the code-name to LOWCODE. However, he needs to explicitly do so. Otherwise the memory below the hires screen is totally wasted.
Trivia: Allowing to do this hires screen buffer "covering" was the very reason to change tgi_init() to not clear the hires screen anymore.
This change includes some cleanups, removal of mainargs.s (game console
programs never have arguments), and a workaround for a problem I'm seeing.
The problem is that sometimes (in fact, more often than not) the clrscr()
call in testcode/lib/joy-test.c writes some garbage chars on the screen (most
often a "P"). Could be my hardware (I haven't seen it on MAME), but to
me the root cause is still unknown.
The configuration file and runtime (crt0.s) provided for the default NES
ROM layout (2x16k PRG, 8k CHR) incorrectly added interrupts (IRQ1, IRQ2,
TIMERIRQ) which are not supported by the NES hardware. For example, see
the NESdev wiki, which makes no reference to these interrupts.
https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/CPU_memory_map
The VECTORS region was also incorrectly set to 0xFFF6, which would have
left the 0xFFF4 normally unspecified. This did not result in any error,
however, since cc65 simply placed ROMV directly after ROM0 regardless of
start address.
(This layout may be due to a copy-and-paste from the PC-Engine
configuration, whose interrupt registers start at 0xFFF6, begins with
the three interrupts listed above, followed by NMI and START, and does
not end with a final IRQ interrupt.)
Despite the absence of any actual error, since START is still placed at
0xFFFC, this patch removes the nonexistent interrupts and also correctly
aligns the ROM0 and ROMV regions. It also has the (admittedly very
minor) benefit of freeing up 6 additional bytes for ROM0.
- All segments but CODE are optional and CODE is R/W. Both together allow to "just" write code/data without ever explicitly using a segment.
- Symbols are defined for the BSS. This allows to use/implement zerobss.
- The ZP memory area isn't artificially limited.
In normal situations it isn't too useful to define symbols for optional segments as those symbols can't be presumed to be always present.
I in fact suspect that most currently present combinations of 'define' and 'optional' aren't useful - apart form the overlay configurations of course.
Make the same changes to the Apple II that were done with 0ee9b2e446 to the C64.
Notes:
- The startup code deliberately doesn't make use of symbols defined for the LC segment as that segment is optional.
- The <...>-asm.cfg configs move the segment BSS to an own memory area BSS although this doesn't seem necessary. However the benefit is that the size of the memeory area MAIN is identical to the number of bytes loaded from disk into RAM. To keep this an invariant for all Apple II configs allows to simplify the EXEHDR to just refer to the symbols defined for MAIN.
The constructors are _NOT_ allowed anymore to access the BSS. Rather they must use the DATA segment or the INIT segment. The latter isn't cleared at any point so the constructors may use it to expose values to the main program. However they must make sure to always write the values as they are not pre-initialized.
The CBMx10 targets don't use the INIT segment in the startup code. So it may turn out to be not necessary at all for certain programs.
The CBMx10 targets don't need symbols for the ONCE segment. Likely their definition was a C&P error in the first place.
The main chunk load header references __BSS_LOAD__ so BSS must be the first bss type segment. Subsequent changes will move ONCE to share its address with the BSS. Then it'll be necessary to load INIT from disk. Therefore we do it right now.
The BSS segment and the ONCE segment share the same start address. So they need to be placed in two different memory areas.
So far BSS was placed in the MAIN memory area and ONCE was placed in an additional memory area. Both memory areas were written to the output file. They just "happened" to be loadable and runnable at a stretch.
Now ONCE is placed in the MAIN memory area and BSS is placed in an additional memory area. Only MAIN is written to the output file. It becomes more obvious that BSS is "just" defined to share memory with ONCE.
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
Moving __cwd from BSS into INITBSS does of course ;-) not only impact the CBM targets but all targets with disk I/O support.
Note: Code using `__cwd-1` may trigger an ld65 range error because __cwd may end up at the very begining of a segment. As far as I see this is an ld65 bug which I'm not try to fix - at least here.
So far the INIT segment was run from the later heap+stack. Now the INIT segment is run from the later BSS. The background is that so far the INIT segment was pretty small (from $80 to $180 bytes). But upcoming changes will increase the INIT segment in certain scenarios up to ~ $1000 bytes. So programs with very limited heap+stack might just not been able to move the INIT segment to its run location. But moving the INIT segment to the later BSS allows it to occupy the later BSS+heap+stack.
In order to allow that the constructors are _NOT_ allowed anymore to access the BSS. Rather they must use the DATA segment or the new INITBSS segment. The latter isn't cleared at any point so the constructors may use it to expose values to the main program. However they must make sure to always write the values as they are not pre-initialized.
Made other changes that were recommended by Oliver.
* Changed its name from move_init to moveinit.
* Used self-modifying code in the subroutine.
* The INIT segment doesn't need to be optional (it's used by the start-up file).
When a program starts running, INIT is moved from one place to another place. Then, INIT's code is executed; and, the first place is re-used for variables. After the INIT code has finished, the second place can be re-used by the heap and the C stack. That means that initiation code and data won't waste any RAM space after they stop being needed.
If kbhit() detects that a key is pressed, it fetches and
buffers the character. If cgetc() detects a buffered character,
this one is returned instead of fetching one with the PROM
routine.
- Put a BASIC-language stub at the beginning.
- Removed the Autostart flag.
Those changes make it easy to give command-line arguments to a program.
* Made the Atmos configure file accept a special symbol definition on ld65's command line. We can use "__RAMEND__" to increase the amount of RAM that's available to programs.
This change was suppsed to fix the issue that the former JUMPTABLE is merked as 'ro' while it is actually written to in several scenarios. When drivers are converted using co65 and then compiled into ROMs the JUMPTABLE isn't copied to RAM and therefore the write operations in question fail.
However unfortunately I didn't succeed in changing that :-( Just setting the former JUMPTABLE to 'rw' broke the drivers. So I placed the DATA segment directly after the former JUMPTABLE segment. This made the drivers converted with co65 work again - obviously after changing libsrc/Makefile:235 from '--code-label' to '--data-label'. But the actual dynamic drivers still didn't work as the former JUMPTABLE wasn't placed as the beginning of the loaded file anymore. That effect could be changed by exchanging src/ld65/o65.c:1391 with src/ld65/o65.c:1394 but doing so broke the drivers again :-((
