MEGA65 Freezemenu

Freeze menu and associated integrated utilities for the MEGA65.

These programs must be installed in the root directory of the MEGA65's SD card for the MEGA65 to function correctly, as much of the interaction with a MEGA65 is via the freeze menu, e.g., to mount disk images, swap loaded program etc.

The main program that is called by holding RESTORE for a short time is FREEZER.M65. This will provide a main menu and call the other M65 programs to provide their functions.

FREEZER.M65:

• Main screen, can freeze states to SD card slots and restore them again.
• Provides toggles to change hardware behavior and manipulate slots.
• Lets you change disk unit numbers, mount real drives or disk iamges from SD.
• Shortcuts to start the other utilities
• press F14 to restore your character set to a sensible default (CHARSET.M65 or MEGA65.ROM)

MEGAINFO.M65:

• you should use this to file a bug report, so we know what versions you have used
• displays information about your MEGA65, such as
  • Hardware Model
  • Core, HYPPO, ROM, and essential file versions
  • RTC status

MONITOR.M65:

• lets you look at the frozen memory

AUDIOMIX.M65:

• audio mixer controls

SPRITED.M65:

• a simple sprite editor you can use to change the sprites in frozen memory

ROMLOAD.M65:

• utility to replace the ROM in the current frozen memory
• also can load *.CHR files directly into chargen WOM

MAKEDISK.M65:

• called from the diskchooser within the drive select
• can be used to create an empty disk image

Other things:

BANNER.M65:

• the boot banner that is displayed on startup

CHARSET.M65:

• not provided with this distribution
• you can place a 4k PETSCII charset here, so you can use F14 to restore it, if some program messed it up
• if not found, freezer tries to load the charset from MEGA65.ROM instead.

xxxTHUMB.M65:

• frames for the thumbnail display

Versions

The latest MEGA65 Freezemenu is always distributed with a core release as the SD Card Essentials. You should normally use the files that come with the core you use. As the FREEZER depends on functions the CORE provides, using different combinations might result in problems.

History

This program was started by forking the MEGA65 FDISK/FORMAT utility, since it has a bunch of the routines we need already in it.

Build Process

A Makefile is provided. FREEZER is build automatically by the core build process and packaged with each core release package.

Prerequisites

You can check the builder-docker/megabuild Docker container for a approved linux build environment.

Some (probably incopmplete) prerequisites:

• need something for pngprepare, -> sudo apt install libpng12-dev

• the 'cc65' toolchain is required, and by default this is taken care of in the Makefile.

  Alternatively, you can supply your pre-built cc65 binaries (see below at "Building").

Building

Use make to build all modules. If you have cc65 installed locally, you can skip building it by using make USE_LOCAL_CC65=1 instead.

Copying to the SD Card

Make sure to always use the rename/delete/copy proces to not produce any fragmented files on your SD card.