Re: Revenge of "Apple Crunch"

[BLuRry <brendan.robert@gmail.com>]

On Jan 14, 9:04 pm, lyricalnanoha
<lyricalnan...@usotsuki.hoshinet.org> wrote:
> I'm gonna do a rerelease of Apple Crunch.  I've recompressed a bunch of
> the games, recracked a couple, reripped a few more.
>
> Though, I really don't like the menus I'm capable of doing in the current
> system. :(  And since I keep the files as BASIC-type (it makes them easier
> to handle), I can't use Beautiful Boot without hacking them.
>
> Here's my questions:
>
> 1. Does anyone know how I might go about doing something like Beautiful
> Boot - a menu with a fastloader that runs in HGR mode - but with the
> ability to run BASIC programs as well as binary?  My current approach is
> to use RDOS 3.3.

Executing a basic program as a binary is pretty easy... (once you know
about the onerr flag anyway)
; Clear onErr flag
LDA #$00
STA $d8
; Store start of basic program (e.g. $801)
LDA #$01
STA $67
LDA #$08
STA $68
; Store end of basic program (start + filesize -- e.g. $6000)
LDA #$00
STA $AF
LDA #$60
STA $B0
;Set LOMEM (optional?)
LDA #$00
STA $69
LDA #$80
STA $69
;Set HIMEM (optional?)
LDA #$ff
STA $69
LDA #$af
STA $69
;Start the basic program
JMP $d566

So you could shove this loader somewhere low in memory like $300 or
you could pre-pend it to the beginning of the basic file.  This is
exactly what I use for AGS to execute basic programs and it seems to
work pretty well.  I set LOMEM to START+SIZE+1 and HIMEM to DOS -1
(and if you don't care about DOS, then just DFFF).   I have a feeling
that what you're doing probably doesn't matter too much if LOMEM or
HIMEM are set -- but I could be mistaken.

> 2. Recommendations - if anyone's seen the Crunch disks, are there any good
> single-load games I lack?  (And where might they be found on Asimov?)

Holy cow, goodness no.  There's over 256 of those things, and many
gems among them.  I'd be hard-pressed to complain without feeling like
a total jerk for doing so.  ;-)

> I am using the same compressor I used originally (Exomizer 2.0), but with
> a series of new conversion tools that makes the process mostly automated
> and painless.  The main program is one I wrote, "bincvtii", and is capable
> of converting between a few binary formats I use internally, plus the
> Commodore binary format (these are all a matter of headers), and patching
> a Commodore BASIC stub (changing its SYS token to fpbasic's CALL token).
> I did a lot of this by hand for the original Apple Crunch volumes.  I now
> just run a Korn shell script on the source file, and get a .txt file ready
> to load into ApplePC (which automagically saves the file too).  I can
> prolly put this stuff up if needed.

Any chance you're willing to share that?  ;-)  I could use something
like that to speed up the AGS menu...

By the way, thank you! :-D

-B