New Quickdev16 Loader

We got a new loader for the Quickdev16 firmware. The loader will replace
the current dummy loader and has a few new advantages:

qd16boot02

* Faster upload because of IRQ driven communication between SNES and AVR
* Progressbar while uploading
* Display Rom infos
* ASCII and Katakana font support
* Eyecandy: new logo design with sine wave effect and bassdrum synced
background effects..

Due to these features the loader blew up to more than 55kb, too much for
our limited space in the AVR progmem (64kb – 4kb bootloader). Our main
firmware is between 8kb and 24kb, depends on the debug-features that you
compile in. So the recent task is to either reduce the loader size by
skipping eyecandy, finding a better compression routine to compress it
in the progmem or build a minimal firmware and put parts of the loader
into the surplus 4kb eeprom on the AVR. Probably we will have to combine
the different approaches.

One reason why the firmware is that big these days is the new “minimal
debug terminal”, a serial command line where you can maintain the
Quickdev system status. You can dump memory regions from sram, switch
between the busses, write to the shared memory section, show the status
of the hardware ports and use several other usefull commands. Check the
project page for more details on the commands.

1 thought on “New Quickdev16 Loader”

  1. I saw this on git, the eye candy is really cool, but the faster loading is more important than eye candy, ROM infos and character support.

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