Good news, my c64 ist still running after lots of years spending time on my attic..
But what I always wanted to know is:
How can I automatically load & run a program from a floppy disk that is already inserted
when I switch on the c64?
Some auto-running command like load "*",8,1 would be adequate...
Regards
MoC
You write that a command that you type in, like LOAD"*",8,1 would be adequate. Can I assume, then, that the only problem with that particular command is that it only loads, but doesn't automatically run, the program? If so, you have a number of solutions:
If it's a machine language program, then you should type LOAD"<FILENAME>",8,1: and then (without pressing <RETURN>) press <SHIFT>+<RUN/STOP>.
If it's a BASIC program, type LOAD"<FILENAME>",8: and then (without pressing <RETURN>) press <SHIFT>+<RUN/STOP>.
It is possible to write a BASIC program such that it automatically runs when you load it with LOAD"<FILENAME>",8,1. To do so, first add the following line to the beginning of your program:
0 POKE770,131:POKE771,164
Then issue the following commands to save the program:
PRINT"{CLR}":POKE770,113:POKE771,168:POKE43,0;POKE44,3:POKE157,0:SAVE"<FILENAME>",8
This is not possible without some custom cartridge.
One way to fix this would be getting the Retro Replay cartridge and hacking your own code for it.
I doubt there is a way to do it; you would need a cartridge which handles this case and I don't think one like that exists.
A better and more suitable solution is EasyFlash actually. Retro Replay is commonly used with its own ROM. Since it is a very useful cartridge by default ROM, I would never flash another ROM to it. Also it is more expensive than EasyFlash if you don't have any of those cartridges.
At the moment, I have Prince Of Persia (!) ROM written to my EasyFlash and when I open my c64, it autoruns just like you asked for.
Not 100% relevant, but C128 can autoboot disks in C128 mode. For example Ultima V (which has musics on C128 but not on C64 or C128 in C64 mode) autoboots.
As for cartridges, I'd recommend 1541 Ultimate 2. It can also run games from module rom images (although Prince of Persia doesn't work for me for some reason, perhaps software issue?), but you also get rather good floppy emulator (which also makes it easier to transfer stuff to real disks), REU, tape interface (if you order it) etc.
If you are working with a ML program, there are several methods. If you aren't worried about ever returning to normal READY prompt without a RESET, you can have a small loader that loads into the stack ($0100-$01FF) The loader would just load the next section of code, then jump to it. It would start at $0102 and needs to be as small as possible. Many times, the next piece to load is only 2 characters, so the file name can be placed at $0100 & $0101. Then all you need to do is set LFS, SETNAM, LOAD, then JMP to it. Fill the rest of the stack area with $01. It is also rather safe to only save $0100-$010d so that the entire program will fit on a single disk block.
One issue with this, is that it clears out past stack entries (so, your program will need to reset the stack pointer back to the top.) If your program tries to do a normal RTS out of itself, random things can occur. If you want to exit the program, you'll need to jmp to the reset vector ($FFFC by default,) to do so.
Related
My Labview Program works like a charm, until I look at the Block Diagram. No changes are made. I do not Save. Just Ctrl+E and then Ctrl+R.
Now it does not work properly. Only a Restart of Labview fixes the problem.
My Program controls two Scanner arrays for Laser Cutting simultaneously. To force parallel working, I use the Error handler and loops that wait for a signal from the Scanner. But suddenly some loops run more often than they should.
What does majorly happen in Labview when I open the Block diagram that messes with my code?
Edit:
Its hard to tell what is happening without violating my non-disclosure agreement.
I'm controlling two independent mirror-Arrays for Laser Cutting. While one is running one Cutting-Job, the other is supposed to run the other Jobs. Just very fast. When the first is finished they meet at the same position and run the same geometry at the same slow speed. The jobs are provided as *.XML and stored as .net Objects. The device only runs the most recent job and overwrites it when getting a new one.
I can check if a job is still running. While this is true I run a while loop for the other jobs. Now this loop runs a few times too often and even ignores WAIT-blocks to a degree. Also it skips the part where it reads the XML job file, changes the speed part back to fast again and saves it. It only runs one time fast.
#Joe: No it does not. It only runs once well. afterwards it does not.
Youtube links
The way it is supposed to move
The wrong way
There is exactly one thing I can think of that changes solely by opening the block diagram.
When the block diagram opens, any commented-out or unreachable-code-compiler-eliminated sections of code will load their subVIs. If one of those commented out sections of code were somehow interfere with your running code, you might have an issue.
There are only two ways I know of for that to interfere... both of them are fairly improbable.
a) You have some sort of "check for all VIs in memory" or "check for all types in memory" that you're using as a plug-in system. When the commented-out sections load, that would change the VIs in memory. Such systems are not uncommon when parsing XML, so maybe.
b) You are using Run VI method for some dynamically invoked VI to execute as a top-level VI, but by loading the diagram, it discovers that it is a subVI of your current program. A VI cannot simultaneously be top-level and a subVI, so the call to Run VI returns an error.
That's it. I can't think of anything else. Both ideas seem unlikely, but given your claim and a lack of a block diagram, I figured I'd post it as a hypothesis.
In the improbable case someone has a similar problem. The problem was a xml file that was read during run time. Sometimes multiple instances tried to access it and this produced the error.
Quick point to check: are Debug and "retain data in wires" disabled? While it may not change the computations, but it may certainly change the timing of very tight loops, and that was one of the unexpected program behaviors, OP was referring to.
I have a two broken VIs with front panels that open fine, but I can't edit or run them, or open theis block diagrams.
One of these was made as a replacement for the first when it started to have this problem. I need to at least find out how to avoid this problem in future, so I don't lose work on bigger VIs.
I'm not sure if it makes any difference, but I very recently upgraded to LabVIEW 2013.
Thank you in advance.
This is the error I get when I try to run them:
"
VI has a bad connection to or cannot find a subVI or external routine.
This VI has a bad connection to or cannot find a subVI or external routine but
it has no block diagram to show or fix the error. You must find or correct the
subVI or external routine. Check for more information in the Explain dialog box
in Get Info.
"
Before reverting to a previous version (using dropbox) I got a different error with one of them:
"
LabVIEW: Generic error.
An error occurred loading VI 'sweep harmonics first test.vi', LabVIEW load
error code 6: Could not load the block diagram.
"
One situation how this happened.
Sometime LabVIEW crashes, and it restart. After restart, LabVIEW will ask you to recover the autosaved code.
I personally always discard those autosaved code. If you do choose to recover autosaved code, there is a chance the recovered code is corrupted. Once you save corrupted code to disk, you are probably going to lose the ability to open/save the block diagram ever again.
Having a version control system is usually a way to avoid minimize the damage when LabVIEW crashes. At worst, you loose maybe an hour worth of work.
If you can't open Block Diagram of your VI, first check the suggestion by #Rodrigo - it is most likely just a "compiled" VI, which has Block Diagram removed.
If you think there is Block Diagram inside and it is just corruped - you may contact NI support. And if you want to look deeper by yourself, extract the VI to XML using pyLabview, and look into the XML - there you can modify every single part of the VI. For example, you may start removing parts until it starts working.
I wouldn't go into manual VI editing unless you have at least a dozen of affected files though. For a single file, it will be faster to re-create it in LabVIEW instead of trying to understand the internals. If many files are affected - may be worth finding the issue in one, as other files probably have the same glitch, so you can make a script which extracts, modifies and re-creates VIs automatically.
From the sound of it, I believe what happens is that you are trying to run the VI's created as "DATA" for an executable, instead of the actual source VI's.
When you build an executable LabVIEW creates a copy of all the Top Level VI's dependencies into the support (DATA) folder which should be in the same directory as your executable.
Try opening the VI's that are marked as not having a block diagram and navigate to File>>VI Properties to check the path from which the VI is being loaded. If it's not the original VI, you can just replace it.
is there any way to use html anchor tag in a gml file..I want to create a hyperlink to location/point in a gml file.
how can i do so???
thanks in advance..
This is a little known GML technique that GREATLY increases the power of Game Maker, and is well worth learning, but as a note, it does NOT work in Studio, because of the countless new restrictions on commands. Go back to GM8.1 (I only ever use that now), and you should have no problem making use of this technique.
The technique is to write a program in another language through GML (batch, vbs, etc, or in this case, HTLM), execute it through GML, then delete the program.
Quite simply, use the file_text commands to create a file with the correct content and extension, execute it with execute_program, and then delete it with file_delete.
Specifically for this script:
argument0 is the link, including the protocol.
argument1 is the anchor, minus the # (that's handled for you).
argument2 is the full browser path.
argument3 is important. This is the time in milliseconds the program will wait before deleting the temporary link file.
(The execute_program command, even when told to wait for the program to complete, continues as soon as the temp file is loaded. If external, the redirect takes some time depending on your connection, so deleting the temporary file halfway through will cause it to fail. 10 milliseconds worked fine for me. The program will hang for this time in this setup, but if you would like to set up an alarm based system to stop it from hanging, that wouldn't be too hard.)
In other uses of this technique without the use of the internet (I use small batch and vbs files a lot), the "hang time" (pun not intended) is usually not necessary.
In addition, the browser location will need to be changed for each different computer
file=file_text_open_write(temp_directory+"\tempLink.html")
file_text_write_string(file,'<!DOCTYPE html>')
file_text_writeln(file)
file_text_write_string(file,'<html>')
file_text_writeln(file)
file_text_write_string(file,'<body onload="')
file_text_write_string(file,"location.href='")
file_text_write_string(file,argument0+"#"+argument1+"';")
file_text_write_string(file,'">')
file_text_writeln(file)
file_text_write_string(file,'</body>')
file_text_writeln(file)
file_text_write_string(file,'</html>')
file_text_close(file)
execute_program(argument2,temp_directory+"\tempLink.html",true)
sleep(argument3)
file_delete(temp_directory+"\tempLink.html")
Sorry I wish It was possible but it's not unless you want to spend a lot of time with dll's. BUT you can create a Script and reuse it everywhere in your code...
script0(argument0,argument1...)
From what experience I have programming whenever a program has a problem it crashes, whether it is from an unhanded exception or a piece of code that should have been checked for errors, but was not and threw one. What would cause a program to completely freeze a system to the point of requiring a restart.
Edit: Thanks for the answers. As for the language and OS this question was inspired by me playing Fallout and the game freezing twice in an hour causing me to have to restart the xbox, so I am guessing c++.
A million different things. The most common that come to mind are:
Spawning too many threads or processes, which drowns the OS scheduler.
Gobbling too much RAM, which puts the memory manager into page-fault hell.
In a Dotnet/Java type environment its quite difficult to seize a system up, because the Runtime keeps you code at a distance from the OS.
Closer to the metal say C or C++, Assembly etc you have to play fair with the rest of the system - If you dont have it already grab a copy of Petzold and observe/experiment yourself with the amount of 'boilerplate' code to get a single Window running...
Even closer, down at the driver level all sorts of things can happen...
There are number of reasons, being internal or external that leads to deadlocked application, more general case is when something is being asked for by a program but is not given that leads to infinite waiting, the practical example to this is, a program writes some text to a file, but when it is about to open a file for writing, same file is opened by any other application, so the requesting app will wait (freeze in some cases if not coded properly) until it gets exclusive control of the file.
And a critical freeze that leads to restarting the system is when the file which is asked for is something which very important for the OS. However, you may not need to restart the system in order to get it back to normal, unless the program which was frozen is written in a language that produces native binary, i.e. C/C++ to be precise. So if application is written in a language which works with the concept of managed code, like any .NET language, it will not need a system restart to get things back to normal.
page faults, trying to access inaccessible data or memory(acces violation), incompatible data types etc.
Would it be possible to take the source code from a SNES emulator (or any other game system emulator for that matter) and a game ROM for the system, and somehow create a single self-contained executable that lets you play that particular ROM without needing either the individual rom or the emulator itself to play? Would it be difficult, assuming you've already got the rom and the emulator source code to work with?
It shouldn't be too difficult if you have the emulator source code. You can use a method that is often used to store images in c source files.
Basically, what you need to do is create a char * variable in a header file, and store the contents of the rom file in that variable. You may want to write a script to automate this for you.
Then, you will need to alter the source code so that instead of reading the rom in from a file, it uses the in memory version of the rom, stored in your variable and included from your header file.
It may require a little bit of work if you need to emulate file pointers and such, or you may be lucky and find that the rom loading function just loads the whole file in at once. In this case it would probably be as simple as replacing the file load function with a function to return your pointer.
However, be careful for licensing issues. If the emulator is licensed under the GPL, you may not be legally allowed to store a proprietary file in the executable, so it would be worth checking that, especially before you release / distribute it (if you plan to do so).
Yes, more than possible, been done many times. Google: static binary translation. Graham Toal has a good howto paper on the subject, should show up early in the hits. There may be some code out there I may have left some code out there.
Completely removing the rom may be a bit more work than you think, but not using an emulator, definitely possible. Actually, both requirements are possible and you may be surprised how many of the handheld console games or set top box games are translated and not emulated. Esp platforms like those from Nintendo where there isnt enough processing power to emulate in real time.
You need a good emulator as a reference and/or write your own emulator as a reference. Then you need to write a disassembler, then you have that disassembler generate C code (please dont try to translate directly to another target, I made that mistake once, C is portable and the compilers will take care of a lot of dead code elimination for you). So an instruction of a make believe instruction set might be:
add r0,r0,#2
And that may translate into:
//add r0,r0,#2
r0=r0+2;
do_zflag(r0);
do_nflag(r0);
It looks like the SNES is related to the 6502 which is what Asteroids used, which is the translation I have been working on off and on for a while now as a hobby. The emulator you are using is probably written and tuned for runtime performance and may be difficult at best to use as a reference and to check in lock step with the translated code. The 6502 is nice because compared to say the z80 there really are not that many instructions. As with any variable word length instruction set the disassembler is your first big hurdle. Do not think linearly, think execution order, think like an emulator, you cannot linearly translate instructions from zero to N or N down to zero. You have to follow all the possible execution paths, marking bytes in the rom as being the first byte of an instruction, and not the first byte of an instruction. Some bytes you can decode as data and if you choose mark those, otherwise assume all other bytes are data or fill. Figuring out what to do with this data to get rid of the rom is the problem with getting rid of the rom. Some code addresses data directly others use register indirect meaning at translation time you have no idea where that data is or how much of it there is. Once you have marked all the starting bytes for instructions then it is a trivial task to walk the rom from zero to N disassembling and or translating.
Good luck, enjoy, it is well worth the experience.