Krokodiles
Entry posted by cd-w
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Last week I received a shiny new Krokodile Cartridge (KC) in the mail. I had been on the waiting list for some time, so it was great to finally get hold of one. It came at a good time, as I needed some way to test my Juno First game on real Atari hardware since exceeding the limits of my Supercharger (SC). In addition to permitting binaries over 4K, the KC has a number of other advantages over the SC: it doesn't require the weird audio setup that I was using to transfer game images, it has a lot more RAM than the SC, it permits multiple games to be stored, and it keeps its content when the power is switched off. As a result, my old SC will now be retired from game development duties, unless I am actually developing for the SC itself, e.g. if I revive my PoP game.
There is one small problem with the KC though: it doesn't have a Linux driver. This is an issue for me as I do most of my computing work under Linux. I do have a Windows installation, as it is sometimes unavoidable, but I would prefer not to have to use it everytime I need to write to the KC. As a result, I decided to investigate the Mac OS-X driver to see if there was some way to port it to Linux, since the two systems have many similarities. SpiceWare was kind enough to send me the source code for his OS-X driver, and a copy of the KC serial transfer protocol document. It quickly became apparent that the protocol was very straightforward, and it wouldn't take too much work to port the driver across. However, as my C coding is rather rusty these days, I thought I would have a go at porting it to Java instead. The advantage of this is that the same code would work across multiple platforms, and it would be easier to build a GUI.
To cut a long story short, I have spent the last couple of days rewriting the KC driver in Java. The serial port communication is accomplished using the Java Communications API. I am actually using the RXTX implementation of this API, as it is available on many more platforms than the Sun version, and seems to be more actively developed. The latest version of my Java code is attached to the bottom of this entry, and there are basic instructions in a README file. It can already download a single file to the KC under Linux, and I have tested it with a variety of different bankswitching schemes. This is actually all that I need, as it lets me test my Juno First game on the KC, but I am planning to clean it up a bit and add multicart support in the near future. I haven't tested it on other platforms, but the Java code should work fine if the correct RXTX implementation is used. Anyway, let me know if this is useful to anyone, or if I am the only Linux hacker around here? At the moment the code is really only intended for experienced Java hackers, but I will improve it further if there is any demand. I don't have any plans to add a GUI at the moment, but I may do this in the future (or someone else might volunteer 
).
Chris
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