Does anyone see anything wrong with using the 'private area'

unclemiltie · Post by **unclemiltie** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 6:16 pm

I've been thinking of this as I try to finish up the 15-13x remotes.

1: there's a big block of memory used as a "private" area that I can't figure out if it's ever used

2: the special protocol code takes up a fair piece of upgrade memory when it's installed by default by the extender

So, I've been working on putting only the headers for the specials in the upgrade area and a JP to the code that resides in the private area.

I'm almost done with it, it wasn't that hard but I complicated it by changing the way that things got activated and deactivated and broke something. (sigh!) This should give back a fair amount of upgrade memory and use something that appears to be pretty much unused.

Any downsides to doing this?

If not, the published version of this extender will do this. If it works well, I'll go back and retrofit the Atlas extender to do this as well.

-bill

unclemiltie · Post by **unclemiltie** » Sat Oct 25, 2008 7:33 pm

Well, to answer my own question....

I tried to build the 15-13x extender using the private area for the code for the special protocols. The specials in the upgrade area have a jump to this area and the code is in a place where it doesn't take up valuable space.

It "almost" works, but not quite.

The JP1.3 remotes are pretty picky about things and this is one of them. I kept finding the private area reset when trying to activate the extender and with the special protocol to activate in that area, things went way bad.

Anyway, on the 15-13x extender I put the special code in the "upgrade 2" area, which is also space that isn't used so it takes some 300 bytes out of the upgrade area and gives it back to the user. But in case anyone else is thinking of doing this, I figured I'd document the reasons here.

-bill