MAC/65 3.6 and page 6

[+videofx]

Does anyone know why with this cart you can not assemble anything to page 6?  

[1050]

Because it's using page 6 in real time to do what it does.

You'll have to get tricky and assemble the output to a disk file instead and also use some other debugger to debug with as that is also likely to be in use if any OSS cart is in use as well. Just a WAG for the second caution however as I don't have a great deal of experience with OSS carts, but they tend to keep to a habit if you will.

 

Directions will be found to the contrary which then have to be disregarded as lies unfortunately. Such was the case when I forged ahead and needed to construct a pre-swap file that must be loaded first when I want to hot swap my mac65 cart in when I didn't boot with it in the first place. My hardware is modified to allow that with a switch thrown. Load the file with page 6 set up as it is with this cart boot and the hot swapped cart doesn't know the difference. Try the hot swap without the file first and you get garbage and a locked up machine. Therefore it IS using page 6, so you are not allowed to overwrite page 6 without dire consequences to the behavior of that particular cartridge. Writing code directly to memory is the default mode with mac/65, it can be changed with alterations to the ASM command as found in the manual.

[Wrathchild]

Also, a good time of thumb when writing code for page 6 is to use relative branching rather than direct jumps so the code is relocatable. This can be then tested on another page.

[+videofx]

Thanks @1050 for the explanation.

 

Thanks @Wrathchild will keep that in mind.

[Rybags]

It's no great loss really.  Page 6 is generally just used for short routines to assist Basic programs.  So you can't really live test them with Mac-65 anyway.

And in development it's easy enough to just put it somewhere else then assemble for target later.