WIP: VIC-2020 MINIMON cartridge
Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2019 1:21 pm
Here's my newest project, the VIC-2020 MINIMON cartridge:
Some highlights:
Here are two videos showing MINIMON in action:
Cheers,
Michael
Edit (2024-04-19): MINIMON has been released on sourceforge, under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 licence.
Some highlights:
- MINIMON is only 2 KB in size!
- Per default, MINIMON is located in $9800..$9FFF, which is unused by most regular software on the VIC-20. Start with SYS 38912.
- MINIMON features all commands usually expected from a debugger/monitor: Memory dump and edit, Register dump and edit, Execute code from monitor, Direct Assembler and Disassembler (all documented opcodes of the NMOS 6502), Transfer/Compare/Fill/Hunt in memory blocks, Use of breakpoints with the BRK instruction, Load/Save/Verify with any storage device.
- Special care has been taken to minimize the intrusiveness of MINIMON. The operation of BASIC and KERNAL is completely unaffected, memory addresses often used by other ML programs have been kept clear - this especially means the usual suspects of $FB..$FE in the zeropage, also the so-called program indirects ($02A1..$02FF) and the tape buffer ($033C..$03FF) are still available for your own use.
- Input and output of MINIMON can be redirected: this enables batch processing with files, printer dumps, even remote debugging over RS232 is possible!
Here are two videos showing MINIMON in action:
- Loading the "Birds" example from here into MINIMON, a disassembly, execution and stop back into the command line (birds.avi, ~21 MB),
- Batch assembly of a re-implemented square root function for BASIC (using Heron's algorithm), test with the square root of two (heron.avi, ~12 MB).
Cheers,
Michael
Edit (2024-04-19): MINIMON has been released on sourceforge, under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 licence.