Up to now static drivers were created via co65 from dynamic drivers. However there was an issue with that approach:
The dynamic drivers are "o65 simple files" which obligates that they start with the 'code' segment. However dynamic drivers need to start with the module header - which is written to. For dynamic drivers this isn't more than a conceptual issue because they are always contain a 'data' segment and may therefore only be loaded into writable memory.
However when dynamic drivers are converted to static drivers using co65 then that issue becomes a real problem as then the 'code' segment may end up in non-writable memory - and thus writing to the module header fails.
Instead of changing the way dynamic drivers work I opted to rather make static driver creation totally independent from dynamic drivers. This allows to place the module header in the 'data' segment (see 'module.mac').
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 :-((
The Apple2 doesn't have sprites so the Apple2 mouse callbacks place a special character on the text screen to indicate the mouse position. In order to support the necessary character removing and redrawing the Apple2 mouse driver called the Apple2 mouse callbacks in an "unusual way". So far so (sort of) good.
However the upcoming Atari mouse driver aims to support both "sprite-type" mouse callbacks as well as "text-char-type" mouse callbacks. Therefore the interface between mouse drivers and callbacks needs to be extended to allow the mouse callbacks to hide their different types from the mouse driver.
The nature of this change can be seen best by looking at the Apple2 file modifications. The CBM drivers and callbacks (at least the current ones) don't benefit from this change.
mrdudz
Greg King
Oliver Schmidt