sage

I just added AUDIn bank switching to my slideshow creator and all utilites.
To test it, I used a patched version of mednafen. Thus I can claim it works nicely on soft and hardware.

But now the questions:
handy (and all other emulators) use the lnx file format which has support for two "banks". But this switching is done by "cart strobes". Now, if you look at the PIN layout, ther is only one read and one write strobe.
So... Is there any usage of this feature in the emulators?
Is there any ROM (I am not aware of) which is using this feature?

If not, its only a two line modification of the emulators to use audin for switching the banks.

If not, what would a be a good way to save the AUDIN switch in the lnx header? There are still few bytes free.
adding two more banks? not really.
adding a flag?

I know alreday two ROMs which do not work, one I know why, for the other not.
Would be nice if some ppl can test and tell me if there are more.

Ah yes, the title picture is skipped on purpose.

The file has to be renamed and copied to the directory the emulator looks for it.
For mednafen its $HOME/.mednafen/lynxboot.img

 lynxtest.bin   512bytes   21 downloads

And as its Xmas, I updated the lynxdir ROM (directory) builder.
Features:

• 128, 256, 512kb ROM size support
  
• uses BLL or EPXY style directories, even in same module
  
• BLL compatible headers possible, even with EPYX header
  
• Troyan entry (for compatibility reason) possible
  
• detects and marks packet files
  
• stripping unnecessary headers
  
• block aligning
  
• Checksumming in loader is disabled, thus no encryption is needed
  
• steering by script file for complex projects
  
• steering by command line for simple mode (just one .o file for quick tests)
  
• support for small internal logo if none is given in script

As this is useless for most people, I decided to release it as kind of a X-mas decoration. Useless, but nice to look at.

This script creates a new encoded header including checksumming for a 256kb ROM.
Thus automating the process of encoding which is described elsewhere.
As are the sourcecodes for the programs.
The encodes stage 2 you can just copy of any of the newer commerical ROMs.
The stage 1 source you would have to decode and reassemble from any of the newer commerical ROMs.

#!/bin/bash
echo "Add a loader to a 256kb ROM (well 1024bytes/block)"
echo "Process $1, get dir entries"
buildchk $1 256
echo "now romdir.i and checkstring.src have been created"
echo "next assmble new stage1 using loader_stage1.asm"
lyxass -d -o "$1.stage1_plain" loader_stage1.asm
lynxenc "$1.stage1_plain" "$1.stage1_enc"
OUT="$1_mod.lyx"
echo "Copy Image file to new name... $OUT"
cp  "$1" $OUT
## Now write the stage 1 part (which depend on file dir)
SIZE1=154
dd if="$1.stage1_enc"  of="$OUT" bs=1 count=$SIZE1 conv=notrunc
## Now write the stage 2 part
SIZE2=256
dd if="loader.stage2_256k_enc"  of="$OUT" bs=1 count=$SIZE2 conv=notrunc seek=$SIZE1
OUT2="_$(basename "$OUT")"
echo "Now make a lnx... $OUT"
mv $OUT "$OUT2"
make_lnx "$OUT2" -b0 256k
echo "Finished"

Finally, I decided to release the lynx conversion of the pucrunch packer/depacker.

• lyxass depacker code is included.
  
• working newcc65 code is also existing (but not included, needs some polish)
  
• the depacker code is expecting that the header is skipped partly on ROM file creation (using lynxdir), thus allowing for stream depacking from ROM (like the turbopacker code). This was not working with the imploder code I used for most of my releases. If you use the original header, you have to remove a few comments in the depacker code
  
• The pack rate of pucrunch is better than imploder and much better than turbopacker