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simonowen / pyz80

pyz80 - a Z80 cross assembler
GNU General Public License v2.0
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[raw binary][bootable image] How to create a bootable image and put a binary in it? #9

Closed Fabrizio-Caruso closed 6 years ago

Fabrizio-Caruso commented 6 years ago

Hi! It seems that your tool could be used somehow to do what I and others may need, i.e., creating bootable disks with a binary in it. The binary in my case is created by Z88DK. It is a raw binary with start address: 32768. It works fine if injected into an emulator and run at that address.

For the sake of simplicity and to make my program (the game CROSS CHASE) https://github.com/Fabrizio-Caruso/ASCII-CHASE/releases), I would like to create a bootable image that starts my binary.

How can I do it? Is it possible? If not, could you please support this feature? It would greatly simplify the production of software for the Sam Coupe.

simonowen commented 6 years ago

I think the best way might be to include your current binary from a dummy source file. Try the following steps:

  1. Create a source wrapper for your binary in wrapper.asm, containing the following:
        org &8000
        dump $
        autoexec
        mdat "yourbinary.bin"

  1. Download the SAMDOS v2 image, which needs to be the first file on the disk for it to be bootable on real SAM Coupé hardware. You can it from here.

  2. Assemble with: pyz80.py -I samdos2 wrapper.asm

Hopefully that will give an auto-booting disk image that will run your game.

Fabrizio-Caruso commented 6 years ago

Thanks a lot! I will try your solution! If it works, I can release my game in a more usable format. Consider that writing a binary directly to a disk image without the need of a .asm wrapper could be a common use-case.

simonowen commented 6 years ago

Yes, it could well be worth adding a new command-line option to provide an auto-executing binary. If that and/or include files are present it wouldn’t require a .asm file too.

There used to be an old command-line C program for adding files to a disk image, which might give a more native option. I think it’s samdisk.c on the NVG FTP archive, not to be confused with my newer SAMdisk utility that only handles full disk images!

I’m sure I can sort something out either way :)

Fabrizio-Caruso commented 6 years ago

THANKS a lot Simon! Can I use your tool to do the same thing to create a bootable disk from a binary file with disc header? (Z88DK -create-app adds the disk header to the binary).

Fabrizio-Caruso commented 6 years ago

IT WORKED! THANKS A LOT!