desegment Mac65 obj files

[sup8pdct]

As topic says. I am trying to find any file that will do it.

There is a program called streamliner from analog but cannot find it.

No doubbt there are others and i am sure i had one. but due to memory loss (age,drinking etc) i cannot remember its name or where i put it. Can someone help??

Thanks in advance.

 

James

[Mathy]

Hello James

 

Streamliner can be found on my BlackBox page, below the picture of the FloppyBoard.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

[Rybags]

I forget which one but I think one of the Win GUI based packers lets you specify which segments are packed or not.

Possibly it could be run with no compression selected anywhere but chances are it doesn't bother to append adjoining memory segments.

 

I didn't realize Mac-65 did that - I know that Atari's AsmEd cart creates those annoying object files with lots of small segments.

 

Alternatively you might be able to write a Basic program to do it for you. Running in turbo on an emulator it would be acceptably fast enough.

[flashjazzcat]

I wrote one in the mid-nineties which does what you want. I'll dig it out tomorrow - it may be of some use.

[sup8pdct]

Hello James

 

Streamliner can be found on my BlackBox page, below the picture of the FloppyBoard.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

 

That one works, but i remember using one that went from the sparta command line? Cannot remember what it is callled?!!!?!!

argggggghhhhh old age.......... and memory........

 

James

[+CharlieChaplin]

Well,

 

the "Streamliner" will only append/merge data-segments if they are contiguous, e.g.:

$2000-21F8

$21F9-2355

$2356-24CA

$24CB-25FF

can be merged into $2000-25FF with it; but data-segments with removed zeros (like many of the Homesoft files) will NOT work, since they are not contiguous:

$2000-21A3

$21AF-21B5

$21B9-21C5

will not merge into one data-segment with Streamliner. Besides, Streamliner is limited to max. 32-38kbytes on the A8 (depending on the DOS you use).

 

There are better and faster tools - on the PC which can even merge data-segments with removed zeros (by adding zeros again), e.g. :

 

"Ataricom" by HiasSoft:

http://www.horus.com/~hias/atari/#tools-win32

works for me under the Win XP command line, use

ataricom filename.ext to view the file / data-segments, then

ataricom -m segment1-segmentxy file-input file-output

to create a file with less data-segments (take care which segments to merge).

 

or the "Superpacker" by TeBe:

http://madteam.atari8.info/uzytki/sp.7z

you don`t need to pack the file, simply load it with Superpacker, then tag all segments you want to merge and finally click on "Append Segments" to merge them into one data segment.

 

-Andreas Koch.

 

P.S.: For SpartaDOS or SDX there is also a tool for this task, but since I never use Sparta, I do not know its name...

 

[+CharlieChaplin]

Hello James

 

Streamliner can be found on my BlackBox page, below the picture of the FloppyBoard.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

 

 

Why not use a direct link:

http://www.mathyvannisselroy.nl/strliner.arc

 

On the PC use e.g. IZ ARC to unarc this file or simply use ARC2ZIP.EXE to convert it into ZIP.

-Andreas Koch.

[thorfdbg]

As topic says. I am trying to find any file that will do it.

There is a program called streamliner from analog but cannot find it.

Certainly. I had here a program named "the cruncher", which is a complete re-design of a basic (or rather, ABC-compiled basic) program that did several things, amongst them shorting binaries by removing sequential zeros. The followup program also made binary load files continuous if it would make sense, in specific it would concatenate the segments Mac/65 created - and would remove the zeros.

 

If you are interested, I'll dig it out.

[+Larry]

I think this is what you are after -- from Bill Wilkinson:

 

http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue71/insight_atari.php

 

Also, here is the typed-in Basic program. My recollection is that this did not work correctly as originally published, and has some minor mods in it.

 

I know that I have used it, but it has been a long time ago. Use with caution (although I really don't believe there is anything wrong with this version.)

 

-Larry

UNIFIER.BAS

[+Larry]

Certainly. I had here a program named "the cruncher", which is a complete re-design of a basic (or rather, ABC-compiled basic) program that did several things, amongst them shorting binaries by removing sequential zeros. The followup program also made binary load files continuous if it would make sense, in specific it would concatenate the segments Mac/65 created - and would remove the zeros.

 

If you are interested, I'll dig it out.

 

I'm interested in your re-design! I'd be interested if not too much trouble to dig out.

 

-Larry

[flashjazzcat]

 

P.S.: For SpartaDOS or SDX there is also a tool for this task, but since I never use Sparta, I do not know its name...

 

 

There's one on here:

 

SDOSUTIL.atr

 

DESEG.COM. Might need to run with the cartridge off to maximize buffer space (it reads the entire file into RAM), but it does work with the Sparta command line.

[thorfdbg]

 

I'm interested in your re-design! I'd be interested if not too much trouble to dig out.

 

-Larry

 

Here it is attached, as a disk image. You need to boot without cartridge and with basic disabled. This program uses all available RAM space, and thus requires a DOS with a very low memory footprint. In specific, it requires free RAM from 0x7c0 up. Thus, I'm including it on a Dos 2.XL image (basically an older version of Dos++ you find in Atari++).

cruncher.zip

[+CharlieChaplin]

 

Here it is attached, as a disk image. You need to boot without cartridge and with basic disabled. This program uses all available RAM space, and thus requires a DOS with a very low memory footprint. In specific, it requires free RAM from 0x7c0 up. Thus, I'm including it on a Dos 2.XL image (basically an older version of Dos++ you find in Atari++).

cruncher.zip

 

Hmm,

 

strange that your program requires such a low lomem ($07C0), the older (?) 1984 version of "The Cruncher" by Olaf Hausiek runs fine under DOS 2.0 and DOS 2.5. There are lots of similar bit/byte cruncher or compressor programs (which remove zeros from a ML-file). In the 80s my friends used them to save lots of diskspace and give me shorter ML-programs for my 1010 recorder (since I did not have a disk drive then)...

 

Nowadays I would not use The Cruncher or File-Compactor (by S.Baucke, author of the famous gamedos Nano-DOS converter) or similar programs anymore, since it is awful to have ML-files with dozens or hundreds of segments. But these programs were some of the early packers we had on the A8...

 

-Andreas Koch.

packer2.zip

Edited November 16, 2013 by CharlieChaplin

[thorfdbg]

 

Hmm,

 

strange that your program requires such a low lomem ($07C0), the older (?) 1984 version of "The Cruncher" by Olaf Hausiek runs fine under DOS 2.0 and DOS 2.5. There are lots of similar bit/byte cruncher or compressor programs (which remove zeros from a ML-file). In the 80s my friends used them to save lots of diskspace and give me shorter ML-programs for my 1010 recorder (since I did not have a disk drive then)...

 

Nowadays I would not use The Cruncher or File-Compactor (by S.Baucke, author of the famous gamedos Nano-DOS converter) or similar programs anymore, since it is awful to have ML-files with dozens or hundreds of segments. But these programs were some of the early packers we had on the A8...

 

-Andreas Koch.

The older cruncher is just an ABC-compiled basic program and hence pretty slow, and it started at 0x1f00, where ABC would usually relocate its runtime to. The reasons why I picked such a low lowmem is simply because it allowed the program to handle very long segments (which it would load into memory) and then remove the zeros, and simply because at this time I was already using my own Dos consistently, so there was no penalty in starting so low in RAM (it requires 163 bytes of precious system RAM). Hence, the result was very fast. Additional benefit is that there was no need to include any type of decoder.

 

Nowadays I have a one-page C program for the same purpose on Linux, just written for nostalgic reasons, so practiability was not quite the question to begin with.

[Mathy]

Hello Andreas

 

Why not use a direct link:

http://www.mathyvannisselroy.nl/strliner.arc

If I would have wanted for people to just download files, I could have just made a list available of all the files. But I want people to look at the rest of my site. You can find stuff there, that you'd never know about, if you only jump to certain files.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

[russg]

As topic says. I am trying to find any file that will do it.

There is a program called streamliner from analog but cannot find it.

No doubbt there are others and i am sure i had one. but due to memory loss (age,drinking etc) i cannot remember its name or where i put it. Can someone help??

Thanks in advance.

 

James

I tried streamliner on Express 850 v.3. It is a 32K program with many 'sections'. It saved 14 bytes. It made no mistakes, just didn't accomplish much. Multistage binaries usually have multiple 'inits' before the final 'run', so

it isn't possible to join many sections. I guess Mac65 object programs may have several sections that are adjacent, and no 'inits', so it could make loading faster. If someone (the OP?) is thinking you can make a single

stage binary out of multistage loading program, it ain't gonna happen.

[sup8pdct]

I tried streamliner on Express 850 v.3. It is a 32K program with many 'sections'. It saved 14 bytes. It made no mistakes, just didn't accomplish much. Multistage binaries usually have multiple 'inits' before the final 'run', so

it isn't possible to join many sections. I guess Mac65 object programs may have several sections that are adjacent, and no 'inits', so it could make loading faster. If someone (the OP?) is thinking you can make a single

stage binary out of multistage loading program, it ain't gonna happen.

Mac65 divides each binary into aprox 256 byte segments so for an 8k continous file, that is 32 segments. A continous file is what I am after for what I am doing. I am not after saving disk space. I have used m65 a lot and have the orignal manual, so i tend to stay with what i know how to drive.

 

James

Edited November 17, 2013 by sup8pdct

[russg]

Mac65 divides each binary into aprox 256 byte segments so for an 8k continous file, that is 32 segments. A continous file is what I am after for what I am doing. I am not after saving disk space. I have used m65 a lot and have the orignal manual, so i tend to stay with what i know how to drive.

 

James

The reason I'm interested, is that I have made a single stage binary program/file to cassette utility. I guess streamliner will make such a file out of a Mac65 object file.