Today I was playing some BASIC games, and I encountered many errors involving archived subprograms, undefined pictures, and undefined lists. To make playing BASIC games less of a hassle, I have decided to create a program that unpacks programs and their dependencies like groups, only in a more GUI'ified and useful way.

Current ideas:

Create archives
Unpack archives
Extract items in archive to a DCS folder
Show readme when unpacking items in archive

The archives will contain all dependencies of the program and the program itself. It will be stored as a huge archived program on the
calculator.

Any feature requests/feedback will be appreciated.

So, this will be on-calc? I'll help if you need it, or want it. Will these be compressed? If so, how? I recently ran into the problem of compressing, and I ruled out RLE pretty quickly, but Iambian's method called stringy, spongey, or something (slips my mind). I'll look for it in a minute if someone bugs me about it (should I forget). Will it be kinda like Apt in linux?

This is on-calc, and it will be compressed if I can find a compression method (not RLE). It will be like Apt, but with no downloading (although I could use CalcNet to set up repositories, but that's not goibg to happen anytime soon)

Start getting a handle on the algorithms for dependency resolution (maybe start by writing a sudoku solver). It's a fun time.

The dependency resolution will be nowhere near as complicated as a sudoku solver

Did you happen to see what ACagliano and I were discussing with his Antivirus program? We were actually thinking that an installer-type thing would be an awesome idea, something self-contained that could create data types, create a DCS folder, put programs and subprograms in there, and archive anything necessary. I would think that it might be a cool feature of SourceCoder to be able to generate these, but it would require a lot of changes such as the ability to save datatypes other than programs. There would still need to be someone to write the unpacker code such as Souvik, regardless.

Unfortunately real dependency resolution--the kind, for example, used in installing .deb packages--uses that sort.

.deb makes children cry though.

I hope you figured out what the algorithm you were thinking of was; I'm curious what compression scheme has a name like those.

Today I was working on copying the contents of one program to another (to make the archives) using Celtic3, but it was extremely slow. How would I make an assembly or Axe program to do this?

I haven't the fainted clue how to do it in Axe; in ASM, the correct way to do it is to create the program in RAM and then archive it all in one shot. That's how you should be doing it in Celtic as well.

What I am trying to do is combine all programs into one big program, and the only way to do it in Celtic is copy line by line. That takes about .75 seconds per line

But you're copying line-by-line into a RAM program first, not an archive program, aren't you? Also, I'm pretty sure we can come up with some metadata so you can copy a full program's worth of lines in one shot.

Ok, so I have tried using Axe to copy programs but it keeps ram clearing on me. Can anyone help me write an asm program to copy an arbitrary number of programs' data into one program?

Surely, can you help us with some more specific information about inputs and outputs?

Str1 will contain the names of programs to copy padded to eight characters per name by spaces.
Like "AAREMNDRSUB1 "

Str2 contains the name of the program which all programs will be copied to.

Can it be assumed that all programs are in RAM? Can the originals be deleted once they've been copied into the destination? Does the destination program need any metadata in it?

All the programs will be unarchived, and they cannot be deleted.

The destination program will have a structure like this:

Code:

That's certainly doable. I would think you would need some better way to separate items, though, like something invalid in a normal program (:+++++ for instance). Shall I guide you through writing that in ASM yourself, or would you prefer just the code to do it?

I would like you to guide me through it.