laser500-exomizer

Exomizer self extracting build tool for Laser 500.

Takes an exomized Laser 500 program and turns it into a self extracting executable.

The self-extractor uses the Z80 deexo.asm routine relocated at the address $F500. After decompression, the system VARTAB pointer is set according to the uncompressed file length. That can be overidden for special cases (e.g. multiple chunks programs) with the -v option which sets explicitly the VARTAB pointer.

Installation

npm i -g laser500-exomizer

Usage

After installation, you can call the command exolaser from the prompt.

Example:

First create the exomized data bytes from AMSTERD.bin. It's assumed that exomizer.exe is already installed and in the path.

exomizer.exe raw -P0 amsterd.bin -o amsterd.exo.dat

Now create the Laser 500 self extracting program amsterd.exo.bin

exolaser -i amsterd.exo.dat -u amsterd.bin -o amsterd.exo.bin 

Testing

You can also test decompression with the test_deexo command. It runs the deexo routine in a simulated Z80 environment using the given parameters.

Example

test_deexo -o amsterd.bin 8995 -c amsterd.exo.dat e400

• amsterd.bin is the original uncompressed file
• 8995 is the memory address where the file will be decompressed to
• amsterd.exo.dat is the exomized bytes file
• e400 is the memory address where to put the exomized data bytes

There is also a -b option that switches to backward compression using the Z80 assembler routine deexo_b.asm. It requires that the exomized data bytes are created with the exomizer -b option.

Backward compression is used when the compressed data have to be placed in memory before the decompressed section. Normal forward compression is used when the compressed data are placed after the decompressed section.