File2VDK anyone?

A place to discuss everything Dragon related that doesn't fall into the other categories.
pser1
Posts: 1652
Joined: Sun Mar 25, 2012 7:32 pm
Location: Barcelona (SPAIN)

Re: File2VDK anyone?

Post by pser1 »

tjewell wrote:Hi Pere!
The binary files I'm pulling off disks don't seem to have that header structure - but then again, neither do any of the other BIN files I have on my system. I found this conversation from, gosh, nearly 10 years ago with Sixxie - viewtopic.php?f=5&t=275#p1644 - where he says to use Coco bin files, which is what I've been doing. But I might be going off a tangent here! :)
So a simple example ... I've got "FlagonBird_1.1.vdk" from the archive, and it's got just FLAGON.BIN on it. I'd like to extract FLAGON.BIN and run it directly in Xroar. Maybe this isn't the best way to do it! I can run 'DragonDos.exe read "FlagonBird_1.1.vdk" FLAGON.BIN", get the BIN file, but I can't work out how to run it.
I also note that if I do a FILE2VDK.exe FLAGON.BIN, and mount the FLAGON.BIN.vdk, I can do a DIR and see FLAGON.BIN, but when I try and run it, I'm getting an FM error.
Any idea what I'm doing wrong? And maybe there's a better way to do this? I'd just like to pull a binary file off a disk, have a look at it, maybe poke it with a Hex Editor and run it.
(Also, what's the best route for disassemblers and assemblers at the moment - for a long time I used Sixxie's perl scripts, but I'm guessing LWTOOLs is better?)
Cheers,
Tony
Hi Tony,
I must insist!
You will never get to load a binary file into XRoar if that binary file has *no* header. And the header must be a Dragon type one.
I know that DragonTools doesn't add the header to the file when you extract it, but then you need to add one, for instance using
a hexadecimal editor adding the 9 bytes. It is easy if you have to do it from time to time.
The three addresses exist in the disc structure, at the begining of the first sector occupied by that file inside the VDK, in fact
you will see there the whole header (9 bytes) ...
cheers
pere

PD I use ASM6809 assembler (Sixxie) and as disassembler F9DASM
tjewell
Posts: 346
Joined: Mon Oct 19, 2009 4:58 pm
Location: Cambridge, England

Re: File2VDK anyone?

Post by tjewell »

Thanks to you both, Bosco and Pere!

It always worries me how much I forget if I don't do this for a while - although it does come flooding back! I'm slightly embarrassed to see I've asked similar questions before over the years - although reading back over my old posts does refresh my memory :)

Pere - I was muddling up .bin and .rom files - when we did the stuff for the Orch90, I could just compile up a rom, and specify that on the command line. Of course, what I'm trying to do now will require headers. I'm surprised that DragonTools removes the header - I'm sure Rolf had a good reason!

Just reminding myself how GDB works - it's rather neat, and does disassembly (although I suspect I should look at MAME too). Sixxie's 6809dasm.pl seems to work fine for the bigger stuff, but F9DASM looks good too, I shall explore. I've got LWASM on my machine, as that's what I used for Fuzix, and Sixxie's ASM6809 too - plus a really ancient version of ASM6809 written in Perl! I'll have a play with each and see which suits me.

Thanks again! Tony.
Post Reply