AMIGA 500 OCS Version 1 Alpha 8

This is just a small bugfix release for Alpha 7: Some of the keyboard mappings did not yet work as intended and documented. Now they do. Read this: https://github.com/sy2002/AExp/blob/develop/doc/keyboard.md

New Documentation for Core Porters: QNICE and the Shell ROM (m2m rom.asm)

In the meantime there are so many people porting cores to the MEAG65, that I don't dare to list them here because I am afraid that I would forget somebody. 🙂 I am following some of the projects and I noticed, that people are not daring to touch m2m-rom.asm even though this is a very powerful superpower.

This is why I decided it is time for a well written "book" on this topic.

And did you know: As soon as you synthesized a core in a special debug mode of the firmware, you can develop new m2m-rom.asm features quite conveniently without any need to build a new bitstream while doing so.

We start with QNICE the processor (Part 1) and its assembly language (Part 2), because you cannot read the Shell without them. Then we cover the tool that makes firmware development bearable — the Monitor, and the trick of reloading your firmware over JTAG without ever re-synthesizing (Part 3). With that in hand we open m2m-rom.asm itself (Part 4), study the callbacks where the Shell stops and asks your core what to do (Part 5), catalog the library functions you may call (Part 6), and finish with the advanced art of driving Shell internals to achieve things the framework never shipped — real-time disk write-back is our case study (Part 7). A short closing part (Part 8) covers the memory budget you tune and the fatal-error messages you will eventually meet.

Enjoy and continue to build great MEGA65 cores:
https://github.com/sy2002/MiSTer2MEGA65/wiki/QNICE-and-the-Shell-ROM-(m2m-rom.asm)

** New Documentation for the Amiga 500 Core**

https://a500.mega65.org

Just as a reminder - there are also these:

https://c64.mega65.org

and

https://cores.mega65.org