I have been looking at the alempert Fourpack versions of the Apps which takes an interesting approach in splitting the 2 slot Apps so they only occupy 1 slot and using the extra ROM space to hold the rest of the code. These are set up for 2MB devices so I was thinking of trying out 8MB support in there. However, it extracted AlterBios out of Pawn and instead uses the patching version. When that is installed it affects all the apps. That caused me to look more closely at the 8MB support in that version and if I understand it correctly then the method used so far to get Community and Wildcat working is in conflict.
So far the changes made to get Community and Wildcat working were to change the apps to deal with the BIOS ReadFileSec and ProgFileSec calls working with 4096 buffers on a 8MB device rather than 512 on a 2MB. It looks to me that when the AlterBios is used then the patched versions of these calls continue to use 512 byte buffers and the read and write of 4096 is hidden inside the fat fs in Alterbios. If this is correct then it seems that one should be able to use the original unmodified versions of the Apps together with AlterBios to achieve the same result.
Gabonator is different in that it uses its own internal fat fs so I think that does need the sector size changes that I have done.
I think what would be nice to get to would be to use the 1 slot split approach as used in Fourpack together with full 2MB/8MB compatibility. Merging the sector size change into the Fourpack Gabonator is straightforward. If my thought on Alterbios is correct then it should be a matter of making sure the RAM allocation maps are compatible.