[Coco] ROMPak transfer to disk with cart2ram?

[Robert Gault]

Willard Goosey wrote:

> I'm trying to use Robert Gault's cart2ram webpage and his transfer
> program to copy my Slay the Nerius ROMpak to disk.  I have a CoCo 3
> and an MPI.
> 
> Transfer ran, and saved transfer.bin.  So, I do a hard reset, (hello,
> 3 muggateers!) loadm"transfer"
>   wait for the drive to stop spinning
>   exec
>   reset
>   savem"slay",&h3000,&h6fff,&h3000
> 
> Do another hard reset, and loadm"slay"
> When I exec, I get an FS error.
> 
> What am I doing wrong?
> 
> I have to do a reset after running transfer.  If I don't, the disk
> drive won't turn on, and any disk I/O returns an I/O error.
> 
> Also, long ago Neil Morrison posted a list of patches for rompaks,
> including Slay the Nerius.  For Slay the Nerius, the patches are at
> &h5124 and &h5125.  I assume that this is accurate when the ROMpak has
> been moved to &h3000?
> 
> Willard


The flow should be 1) compile TransferA and save, compile TransferB and 
save; 2) use TransferA to copy ROM pak and save ROM pak. Then to play 
the pak the flow should be 1) loadm pak copy; 2) loadm TransferB and 
move pak to normal location; 3) run pak.

Obviously not all paks will be happy with this or like a Coco3. If the 
pak contains a copy protection scheme, it will need to be patched. That 
will best be done before it is saved to disk. Any patch location used on 
the original ROM pak will need to be offset just as the pak was during copy.

=======================

Disk problems after the first transfer.

It looks like TransferA may need to be modified to reset $FF23 to its 
original state. Since I provided source code, a simple modification of 
the program to save the original state of $FF23 and restore it should be 
trivial.

I don't know if the use of RESET will be detrimental. The code as posted 
did work for me but is certainly not written in stone. Modify it if needed.