Commodore 116 dead cpu
29 November 2021
Best wishes and upcoming arrivals!
22 December 2021
For the Commodore 64 there are many programs that we can use, or we can create new ones, to load them there are different possibilities between cartridges and peripherals, but if we want to create our own cartridge with the program that starts automatically?
I'll show you a simple system that requires a few steps.
What do you need?
First let's convert our .PRG file into a .CRT cartridge format
For this step you need to have Python installed on your computer, find it for both Windows and Mac or Linux.
Let's download the called script now prg2crt downloadable here.
We run this script from the terminal or Python command line. (let's assume we convert the myprog.prg program to cartridge.crt image)
python prg2crt.py myprog.prg cartridge.crt
We now have a crt file that we can load into an emulator like the Vice and verify that everything is working.
However, this file cannot be written to an eprom, we must first do another step to remove the header that the cartridge has.
For this step we need the VICE emulator which has a tool called cartconv which we will need to transform the CRT file into a binary that can be written to the eprom.
Below is the command to give to cartconv (-i input file) followed by the name of our crt (-o output file) followed by the name of the .BIN file
cartconv -i cartridge.crt -o mycart.bin
Once this is done we have the binary file that can be written to the eprom, we have created a cartridge !!!
Attention! however, we cannot use any cartridge, if the program is within 8k we can use any cartridge such as the Versacart but if the program is bigger (I've never tried the Versacart up to 16k) in this case we have to use a magic desk capable of addressing the whole memory. This cartridge can handle up to 2 EPROMs of 512k... not enough for you? 🙂
I hate using cartconv ...
AHH yes? Then you'll have to do it by hand!
If you don't want to use cartconv, you can safely tinker with the crt file by opening it with a hex editor and removing the cartridge header.
Not only that, every 8k of data there will be a new header, so these lines must also be removed.
ES: $2000, $4000 .. etc.
6 Comments
Con un EX editor devo togliere l’intestazione e sostituire con FF o cancellare ?
A thousand thanks
vanno proprio eliminate le righe. Es. sulla cartuccia di Avenger (file crt) occorre eliminare i bytes da 0 a 4F per poter salvare il file in .bin
OK grazie, così cambiano le dimensioni del file? non da problemi quando si scrive su eprom?
Si la dimensione è più piccola, ma è perché il CRT aggiunge l’intestazione che nella eprom non c’è. Il file BIN che va scritto sulle eprom non ha queste righe.
Ma cosa cambia tra l’usare cartconv o il non usarlo? 🙂
Nulla, se utilizzi cartconv è semplice ma devi lanciarlo da riga di comando o creare uno script. Se non hai il programma installato o non vuoi creare uno script puoi semplicemente togliere le righe di intestazione a mano con un editor hex.