Black Cat Hardware

The last couple of days I have been working on two more ways to load KAOS into RAM. That way Slot No.1 of the FlashROM can be used to store a regular TOS, too.

• booting from a Floppy Disk - it comes as a .MSA file (due to the bootsector that needs to be stored on disk) and needs to be written to an empty disk
• cartridge module - any cartridge module that can hold the typical 128KByte of data can be used. A single 128KByte .BIN is available. You may need to split it into four 32KByte chunks for 27C256 or two 64KByte chunks for 27C512 EPROMs. I used one of my 128KB Cartridge Port Modules (available in the shop), so no splitting was needed.

Putting 192KByte of KAOS + relocation info + cartridge code + graphics + fonts into a 128KByte EPROM was quite a task. In the end I decided to use Mr. Ni's compression code and now there are still 7 KByte free and I didn't even need to compress all data. And it gives good decompression speed (decompressing ~105 KByte KAOS.IMG into 192 KByte target space takes a bit over 2s on a 8MHz 68000).
In any case one slot needs to contain a bootable TOS otherwise neither bootsector nor cartridge can be accessed!
Both work in ST-High and ST-Medium.

If you have interest in the .MSA and/or .BIN just drop me a note.

Besides .MSA there is now another option to create a bootable disk: BootMaker.
BOOTMAKR.PRG contains all the data to be written to a formatted disk in compressed parts of the PRG itself.
It runs in all three ST resolutions.