pouët.net

In my ongoing zx spectrum adventures I ended up making a simple tool to create "releases". Basically you take your compile output (ihx preferred, but binary will do), feed it to Mackarel, and it spits out a .tap file.

But that's not all!

First, the code image is compressed (a couple compression codecs are supported) before storing, and gets decompressed after loading.

Second, there's support for loading screens, and these are also compressed; and, if you don't give a loading screen, one is generated for you.

There's also a bunch of options for a little more exotic needs.

http://iki.fi/sol/zip/mackarel20.zip - latest windows binary
https://github.com/jarikomppa/speccy/tree/master/mackarel - sources
http://sol.gfxile.net/#SPECCYVOL5:MAKINGRELEASES - blog post with pretty graphs

And here's a fish.

pardon my ignorance - what is .ihx?

Intel hex, some small device compilers puke that. Basically memory map in an ascii format. Mackarel prefers it because it can read the start address directly, without developer having to edit makefiles or whatnot, which you'd have to do with raw binaries.

about compression: have you tested compress ratio with zx7 ?

It uses zx7.

Why not lz4, or is that too intensive for Spectrum?

sol: thank you for the fish!

There are z80 decompressors for lz4, but the thing is, lz4 is made for speed, zx7 for better compression, and speed isn't a factor here (after loading from tape for 60+ bloody seconds you can wait for half a second for the decompression).

Oh and here's a link to the announce thread where I'm posting whenever I make a new version:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/discussion/51864/mackarel-one-exe-to-turn-ihx-scr-to-a-tap#latest

where to find lz4 packer+source decompressor? I have only 6502.

Well.. https://www.google.fi/search?q=lz4+z80 showed me the way to a couple implementations of z80 decompressors.

For cutting on long loading times from tape, have you considered using OTLA?

And yes, thanks for all the fish!

The generally accepted extension for those files are just .hex, though (at least in the embedded world).

I've tried OTLA, didn't get it to work for some reason.. could consider replicating the idea though (custom loader + custom wave generation). My point was to primarily simplify my build process, though.

I've seen ihx files in a couple different circumstances (embedded and small device). Whatever the extension, the result is the same =)