Aerospace Software Ltd.

Objective Real-Time Software on the ADSP21XX

EXE2PROM ver. 2.1, ADSP EXE to Binary EPROM file Converter.

1. Introduction

Exe2Prom is an alternative to the somewhat quirky SPL21.EXE, which is part of the ADSP 21XX toolkit. Exe2Prom was created for the special case where one wants to save the DSP code in a 8 bit EPROM. It converts the output of the linker (.exe) directly into a binary file. Since an instruction word is 3 bytes in size, the code will not necessarily fill a complete EPROM page. EXE2PROM will save as many complete program words as will fit in a page. The file is broken up into sequentially numbered blocks, one for each EPROM page and padded with FFH as required, to fill the last unused byte or two.

Exe2Prom saves only the Program Memory and ignores anything in the Data Memory. You should create constant and initialized variable segments, then initialize your data from code space, at run time, using a simple copy loop.

Use Exe2Prom to create separate binary files for a BDMA loader and the application, then append the one file to the other using DOS copy (with the binary mode switches!).

2. Usage

Exe2Prom creates an 8 bit binary EPROM image from an ADSP 21XX .exe file. The binary EPROM block file length is a 4 digit Hexadecimal number, e.g. 12AB.

Example:

exe2prom infile.exe length

Exe2Prom only saves program memory and ignores data memory.

Example to combine a 32 Byte BDMA loader and widget code in one 32KB EPROM image:

exe2prom bdma.exe 0020

exe2prom wdgt.exe 7FE0

copy /b bdma.b0 /b + wdgt.b0 wdgtrom.bin

Note that SPL21 will not convert a file as small as bdma.bin in this example and will produce a file consisting only of an end record, which is not particularly useful. Exe2Prom provides a solution to this problem and provides a simple way to concatenate overlays in an EPROM.