H89 disk transfer program

From: Patrick Rigney <patrick_at_evocative.com>
Date: Mon Apr 14 19:38:00 2003

> It currently takes
> about 40H+ of code to enter ( in octal for Heath monitor ).
> I might find some code in the ROMs that does this
> part for me. This is a little long but there is not much
> I can do about it.

> Any suggestions on things I might want to add?
> Dwight

Dwight,

Hmmm... interesting. I have an idea... How about borrowing a concept from
bootloaders in general? Shorten the program that you have to key in by hand
to just a short bootstrap loader that reads bytes from the serial port and
stuffs memory. The PC-side program's job, then, is to *first* send the
*real* larger downloader down the line before the disk image data, which the
bootloader stuffs into memory and then executes to read the image data that
then follows. I'm not sure how much shorter the bootloader could be than
40H, but I have to imagine a good bit since no disk I/O is needed at that
stage, and it would certainly facilitate the bigger duplicator app being
much larger without much hassle to the operator.

Patrick
Received on Mon Apr 14 2003 - 19:38:00 BST