[Coco] .BIN to .ROM

[Luis Antoniosi (CoCoDemus)]

Chad sorry for breaking your bubble, but do you have a trillion of
years to spare ?

That's what a NP-complete problem might take to solve.

Why ? Because you cannot infer what is data and what is code. How do
you know that the 3 byte that looks like a LBRA $2000 is not in fact a
part of a tile image ? A sprite ? or even raw data ? How do you tell a
jump table from simple data table ?

Worse, how to you infer it's indeed a LBRA and not the middle of 2
others instructions ? The only way is to emulate each instruction from
the start of the code, and make the code run on every possibly branch
condition satisfying every possibility, to make sure you satisfy every
condition in the code, to be sure that you have executed ALL
instruction code from the code. What is left is your data. Can you
count the probability of the problem now ?

It might look simple for a very small program but that's the evil of a
NP-complete problem. There is no fast solution and the time grows
exponentially as the problem grows in size.

Have you tried IDA Pro Disassembler ? It disassembles virtually any
microprocessor on market (even 6809). You begin with full byte code
then you select an address and tell it is code. Then it analyzes and
goes disassembling until it can. Quickly you can see that lot of
routines are missing because they just don't have direct link to the
main brunch. Pointer arithmetic plays an evil on this case. But the
experience is fun and very instructive.



On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 9:55 PM, Chad H <chadbh74 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Very interesting.  That might just be the info I needed.  I can write a
> program if that's what it takes.  Curious to me though that the answer to
> converting a .BIN to a "WAV or MP3" was so complicated when you can just
> CSAVEM/CLOADM, etc and record the audio as WAV or MP3.  Oh well.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] On
> Behalf Of Brett Gordon
> Sent: Monday, December 23, 2013 7:16 PM
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [Coco] .BIN to .ROM
>
> i dont know of a converter prog, but heres the specs
>
> http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Comp/comp.sys.tandy/2007-05/msg00020
> .html
>
> it shouldn't too hard to write a proggy to do this
>
> Brett
> On Dec 23, 2013 7:30 PM, "Chad H" <chadbh74 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Can someone please advise a simple and reliable method to convert a .BIN
>> file to a .ROM file?  I can extract the .BIN on my PC if need be.   I seem
>> to recall a ROM extraction function in the RETRIEVE.EXE included with
>> the CoCo 2 emulator I have that was used for extracting the CoCo ROM
>> to a DISK, then you use the RETRIEVE to grab the ROM data off the
>> floppy into a  .ROM file on the PC.  I doubt this would work for many
>> .BIN files though, especially since many don't start at &HC000.
>>
>>
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