nesdev.org

My quest for a tool that checks free ROM space resulted in this small project. It does the job for me, maybe it could be useful for someone else.

That's how it looks:



Download the tool

That's really nice tool, may come handy.
I'm really curious HOW the tool know which byte is empty byte?
How tool detects it?

Denine wrote:That's really nice tool, may come handy.
I'm really curious HOW the tool know which byte is empty byte?
How tool detects it?

I'm guessing it looks for $FF or $00 bytes (most common choices for ld65 fillval), or it looks for the longest existing runs and uses their byte values.

The algorithm is explained in the readme, and there is source code as well - yes, it looks for the longest existing runs.

FYI, I tried running the app but it complained about two DLLs: borlndmm.dll and cc3270mt.dll. I found those online but it would be nice if they were included in the package for convenience.

Thanks for report, I forgot to disable Dynamic RTL. The file is updated.

Shiru wrote:The file is updated.

Doesn't seem to be updated, the modification time of NESsc.exe is still 2011-12-30.

It is because there was wrong link in the first post (fixed) - I moved files to another place since then, with copy of old files at old place.

Thanks, works now.

Related to that, here's my PHP library for inserting stuff into a ROM according to a list of free space. It is the little brother of the system I have in Chronotools.

It does automatic tail-head merging of partially/wholly identical pieces of data, linking of inter-object references, and attempts to organize the potentially thousands of pieces into the given stripes of free space in a manner that results in most optimal filling.

It is aware of restrictions like "this object must be stored in a pre-defined location" or "these 200 objects must be placed in the same memory bank, whatever that may be".

Source code / download: http://bisqwit.iki.fi/src/romlinker_php.zip

The field of use for this library is in ROM hacking. I used it in the creation of my Finnish translation patch of Simon's Quest.
See inc/linker.php , which contains phpDocumentor compatible documentation.

There's a bug in the way this tool finds the fill byte, so it doesn't always use the byte with the longest run in the file. I took a look at the code, and as far as I could understand, the bug seems to be here: Should be:

Guess you are right, updated the file.

Shiru wrote:Guess you are right, updated the file.

Thanks!