Method for loading assembly games on cassette

[Le Derp]

First of all - I'm rather a newbie with this system, so excuse me if this is an absurd question.

 

As the title states, I'm looking for a way to run cartridge ROM's from a cassette tape. I saw this post here a while back:

 

 

retroclouds:

*snip*

Trying to load assembly games from tape is possible, but it's quite a task.

I would definetely go for a nanoPEB (CF7+), it will make your task a lot easier.

 

I am wondering what this task is. If anybody has even the faintest idea, could they please point me in the right direction?

 

Thanks in advance!

[+Ksarul]

The first hurdle in the process is that you must have a 32K (or greater) memory device attached to your console in some way (internal or external). Assembly software requires access to CPU memory--and the bare console only has 256 bytes of it, which is generally insufficient for any Assembly program (there are some small-program exceptions). You also need something capable of loading and saving it to tape. The Mini Memory will do this, so that is one way--and it has the bonus of containing 4K of CPU RAM, so you also have another place that your programs can slide into (smaller ones, but still a lot better than 256 bytes).

[jrhodes]

The first hurdle in the process is that you must have a 32K (or greater) memory device attached to your console in some way (internal or external). Assembly software requires access to CPU memory--and the bare console only has 256 bytes of it, which is generally insufficient for any Assembly program (there are some small-program exceptions). You also need something capable of loading and saving it to tape. The Mini Memory will do this, so that is one way--and it has the bonus of containing 4K of CPU RAM, so you also have another place that your programs can slide into (smaller ones, but still a lot better than 256 bytes).

And other then the mini memory, what other options would one look at?

[apersson850]

Any memory expansion, from TI's stock thing in the expansion box to a home-made inside the console (I have both). Then some command module which can allow you to load memory image files from cassette. Editor/Assembler will do. But you still have to get the program you'd like to load to the tape in the first place.

 

I was once involved in developing a simple word processor for a very specific hardware:

TI 99/4A

Extended BASIC

32 K RAM expansion

Tape recorder

 

The word processor was written in BASIC, but with assembly language support. Normally Extended BASIC can't load assembly programs from tape, but either you have to include the code in the BASIC program and poke it into memory, or you load it from disk. So I wrote a program which was the simplest possible file loader, and the BASIC program poked that into memory. Once you loaded the BASIC program (OLD CS1) and typed RUN, this assembly program was created and run. It would immediately load another file from the tape, and this file contained the whole support routine for the word processor.

The actual assembly support could then load and save the word processor files to both disk and cassette as memory image files.

To create a program, you first had to do a SAVE CS1 for the BASIC program, then load (from disk) and run a program which created and saved the assembly support file immediately after the BASIC program on the tape. After that, you could take the tape to a system which had no disk, just a tape recorder, and run it there.

[+Ksarul]

That sounds almost like the WORTEX program from Amnion Software. . .a program that I bought from them while they were still in business.