.car to .xex?

[eegad]

Way back when, I had a utility that would dump a cart to a disk file. It worked great (though of course some of the carts I dumped had copy protection that had to be removed afterwards).   But anyway, what I'm looking for at the moment is a similar utility, but that will take an existing .car file and convert it to a disk file. And yes, I'm talking about non-bankswitched carts. 

 

[In theory, I know what needs to be done (move video memory to below the cart addresses, then move the .car data to the usual cart memory and jump to it)...but in practice I haven't done any programming in 30 years, so hoping someone already has something on hand to do this]

[Wrathchild]

I'd first consider the titles you aim to do as I would suspect they've all pretty much been done by now and can be found on sites like atarionline.pl

[mr-atari]

I did something like that for LiteDOS.

Called it REMU (Rom Emulation), it loads standard 16k or 8k cartridges and (tries) to run it.

http://www.mr-atari.com/Mr.Atari/LiteDOS/

Not a car to xex program, but a rom loader.

Grtz!

 

[bfollowell]

14 hours ago, Wrathchild said:

I'd first consider the titles you aim to do as I would suspect they've all pretty much been done by now and can be found on sites like atarionline.pl

 

I'd agree with @Wrathchild. I'd say there's very few, if any, cartridge titles that aren't already available.

 

[eegad]

5 hours ago, bfollowell said:

 

I'd agree with @Wrathchild. I'd say there's very few, if any, cartridge titles that aren't already available.

 

I agree of course for all the old commercial cart releases. Still, there a few Homebrew type things that have only been released as a .car file. Most recent example is the wonderful Fishing Derby conversion. I'd like to run it on a real 800xl via an sdrive Max, but sdrive doesn't do cart files. 

 

[Wrathchild]

I should think you could just hex edit an existing xex and splice in the replacement 8K as basically it'll do the mem setup and init/run vector calls for you.

[Wrathchild]

18 hours ago, eegad said:

Most recent example is the wonderful Fishing Derby conversion.

 

Here's a wrapper for such a cart, here I've stripped the FD car header so it is just the 8K binary.
This can also be done by loading the CAR into Altirra and saving the cartridge without the header.

 

From a command prompt the binaries can be joined together.

copy /b reloc_8k.dat + /b FishingDerby.bin + /b initrun.dat /b fd.xex

Reloc copied the cartridge data into place and transfers control to it, initrun is the xex tail to launch the reloc.

 

 

fd.xex reloc_8k.dat initrun.dat

[eegad]

Awesome! Thank you so much!

[vinniet]

I am trying to understand the process.  I would like to convert the homebrew FloB from cart to xex.   Can someone please assist. 

[dzzy1982]

48 minutes ago, vinniet said:

I am trying to understand the process.  I would like to convert the homebrew FloB from cart to xex.   Can someone please assist. 

I second this, I was trying to use this process to create a xex out of the 810 diagnostic cart image for testing purposes on real hardware. I would imagine the reloc.dat file would be different for each cart, how to extract?

[vinniet]

On 1/15/2022 at 4:05 AM, mr-atari said:

I did something like that for LiteDOS.

Called it REMU (Rom Emulation), it loads standard 16k or 8k cartridges and (tries) to run it.

http://www.mr-atari.com/Mr.Atari/LiteDOS/

Not a car to xex program, but a rom loader.

Grtz!

 

Can you explain how REMU works.  I was not able to find anything on the LiteDOS site.  Thanks!

[glurk]

6 hours ago, vinniet said:

I am trying to understand the process.  I would like to convert the homebrew FloB from cart to xex.   Can someone please assist. 

Not going to happen.  That's NOT a 16K or 8K cart.  It's a very large cart that relies on bankswitching to contain all the data.  It's possible the original author could create an ATR version or something, but you cannot add a simple relocator to it like a 16K or 8K cart image.

 

[vinniet]

24 minutes ago, glurk said:

Not going to happen.  That's NOT a 16K or 8K cart.  It's a very large cart that relies on bankswitching to contain all the data.  It's possible the original author could create an ATR version or something, but you cannot add a simple relocator to it like a 16K or 8K cart image.

 

Thanks for getting back to me.  I did try it and didn't work as you said.   Maybe another way would be good like running cart in LiteDOS.  

[glurk]

That particular one - FloB - absolutely requires being a bankswitched cartridge image.  It contains more in ROM data than the Atari has RAM for.

[carlsson]

On 1/16/2022 at 1:08 PM, Wrathchild said:

From a command prompt the binaries can be joined together.

copy /b reloc_8k.dat + /b FishingDerby.bin + /b initrun.dat /b fd.xex

Reloc copied the cartridge data into place and transfers control to it, initrun is the xex tail to launch the reloc.

Is this method supposed to be usable on any 16K cartridge image? In the HSC we're trying to play James Bond 007, and almost all the XEX and ATR versions on various sites (Atarimania, Fandal, Atarionline.pl) seem to be of the prototype version which lets you select mission, not the final cartridge which runs all missions in sequence. There are a few BIN/ROM versions though of the cartridge version. I tried your method to splice together an XEX out of the relocation code, binary and init file but Altirra throws up when I'm loading it.

 

Elsewhere I saw some 6502 code that I tried to duplicate in DASM in order to do it myself, but after I assembled that code, absolutely nothing happens when I feed the emulator the resulting file. I tried different file settings regarding load address etc, which caused Altirra to once again throw up.

[Xuel]

17 hours ago, carlsson said:

In the HSC we're trying to play James Bond 007, and almost all the XEX and ATR versions on various sites (Atarimania, Fandal, Atarionline.pl) seem to be of the prototype version which lets you select mission, not the final cartridge which runs all missions in sequence. There are a few BIN/ROM versions though of the cartridge version.

I took a crack at converting the .car file on atarionline.pl:

 

http://atarionline.pl/arch/J/James Bond 007/James Bond 007 (1984)(Parker Brothers)(US)[!].car

 

Here's my attempt to convert it to .xex:

 

james007.zip

 

I only fixed one issue in the code which allows it to boot up and play but there may be others that show up further into the game.

 

Cheers,

Xuel

 

[Wrathchild]

Here's my version, the game initialization overwrites the lower cart area but changing one byte in the cart image handled that. ($5C9 from $A0 to $80)

 

copy /b reloc_16k.dat + /b "James Bond 007 (1984)(Parker Brothers)(US)[!].bin" + /b initrun.dat /b jb007.xex

 

 

jb007.xex jb007.zip

Edited July 30, 2023 by Wrathchild

[Chri O.]

Help...😁 can someone help me convert this Educational System Master Cartridge [re-release].rom to bootable ATR disk?

MC.zip

I need this for my ATARI SIO (Tape recorder emulator FSK audio decoder) based on microcontroller wav file player.

I've got this running on Altirra and Atari LiteDOS-SE - LiteREMU.XEX. but I need this somehow to auto boot...

Just quit example on Altirra.

 

 

LiteDOS-SE (build 2022-02-07).atr NOTE: MC.ROM = Educational System Master Cartridge [re-release].rom

Part 1: Principles of Accounting educational program published by Dorsett Educational Systems

pa1.wav need this in your tape player.

pa1.zip

[jindroush]

Try the two attached (very sloppily hacked together) files. No guarrantees, #worksforme on Altirra.

mc.atr mc.xex

[Chri O.]

Woohoo it's alive it works thank you... 😁

 

I only did try the ATR version need to hold option key while booting. I still need to fix few issues on my side but it's alive thank you.