New XB EA#5 Loader

[Tursi]

I know these have been floating around forever, but I wanted to take a stab at one myself, since it's been asked for a few times for specific programs. I started with the scratchpad loader we made a few years ago at the SWPB group, because it has very few restrictions - supports up to 64-character filenames, up to 10 files, and can load anywhere in the 32k without restriction. It seemed to be tested pretty well by the end, too, but it did rely on the Editor/Assembler functions.

 

I inserted my own DSRLNK code, since XB doesn't provide one (code was created for the F18A slideshow), and I replaced the GPLLNKs with direct code for loading character sets (as created for the 64k cart loaders). I was able to tweak up the scratchpad part of the code a bit to make it all fit, including the clearing of the scratchpad RAM, by repurposing a register or two, then wrote a nice XB wrapper. In general, I'm pretty happy with it, and it works at everything I've thrown at it. So, yay!

 

The included ZIP file has the loader as a TIFILES program (XB), a DSK image with the program saved as LOAD (and a couple of sample programs to load), and the source code. The assembly language is embedded, and the resulting XB program is fairly small, so it loads very quickly! Tested in Classic99, Win994A, CF7 and TICC. (I had trouble getting MESS to mount the disk..)

 

You can safely modify the XB program to do your own thing and re-save it - just preserve the CALL INIT and CALL LOAD statements - without them the CALL LINK won't work. I made it look like the E/A#5 load screen.

 

scratchpad_loader.zip

[Willsy]

Nice one Tursi. I remember working on that around 2008/2009 IIRC. I think we started it initially for Bill Sullivan's TI BASIC+ project, which never saw the light of day. IIRC we managed to shoe-horn some quite neat code into it. Ahhh... Happy days...

[Tursi]

I managed to add some more features to the scratchpad code, too. It's so much fun to be able to look at that sort of thing and figure out how to squeeze a little more out of it.