OK, I have updated the Jet-Story example with an actual loader. You'll find PZX, CSW and WAV in the archive, as well as all the relevant sources for both the encoding scripts and the loader.
Enjoy.
Patrik
P.S. Oh, and remember to disable flashloading in the emulators so you can actually hear the tune :)
OK, I have updated the Jet-Story example with an actual loader. You'll find PZX, CSW and WAV in the archive, as well as all the relevant sources for both the encoding scripts and the loader.
Enjoy.
Patrik
P.S. Oh, and remember to disable flashloading in the emulators so you can actually hear the tune :)
A most impressive feat, fantastic.
Although show that to the average C64 fan and you might be in for some trouble. :p
The CSW files do not work in Spin 0.54, I'll have to upgrade.
Patrik, that's one crazy loader! If I'd seen/heard that loader when I was a kid I would genuinely have fallen of my chair! As it stands, I only have a silly grin on my face at the sheer ingenuity of it all!
Woody, what's that suspicious babyonemoretime.mp3 on your website? Not the currah microspeech in action, surely? ;)
piters, very nice loader! Unexpectedly, I couldn't load the tzx in "normal speed" in Spin (latest version). It did load in "Edge Detection" and "flashload" mode though. Very strange....
This [moonstrike] is the first game that I've found that doesn't work on ZXDS, Side A resets on the the Press Enter to Continue screen after it finishes loading, Side B loads fine.
The loader needs long inverse pulse after the last bit to detect the end of the bit sequence. However this pulse is not present in the TZX file, and the one which ZXDS implicitly generates is not long enough. So one might as well argue that the TZX is flawed, but I will likely work around that in ZXDS anyway...
Doh, loaders like this were so common around here even back in the day, with tools to make them and everything, that I would not even consider them special anymore... :) If one wanted to create something interesting then, he had to go for at least bigger scrolling blocks instead, like in Star Fox.
BTW, in Spin your loader seems to pick the flash bit of the last attribute wrong...
Doh, loaders like this were so common around here even back in the day, with tools to make them and everything, that I would not even consider them special anymore... :)
Hence me not calling it special :)
They're quite boring.
Or even easier still - leave the flash code in, but just change both colours to black.
Or (I think it was the Pacworld demo on a covertape), change both to white, which makes it look like the game isn't loading. If I hadn't left the tape running one time while going off to make a cup of tea, I'd have never realised!
i tryed to slow-load(turned off fast load)starstrike 2 on spectaculator 6.30.the loading bar was there,but the loading bar did not fill up?is this different on other emulators?thank you
colin
As registered user of Spectaculator I can confirm that Starstrike II loads perfectly (with loading bar progress). But I must add that I use Spectaculator 6.25 (I am not sure for v 6.30).
I just looked at the archive version of Moonstrike.
Side A doesn't load in 48k mode (but gets further in 128k mode - although it still doesn't bloody load) and side B doesn't appear to load at all. (I'm using Spectaculator).
Can anyone confirm?
Andrew
Yes, true. Side B loads in both 48k and 128k mode. Side A doesn't load. I am using registered version of Spectaculator 6.25.
Tomcat came up with another idea for a tune loader yesterday. And here is what I came up with. It does seem to be a bit temperamental in a few emulators though but Tomcat has successfully loaded it on a real +2 machine.
Yep - this is a GREAT loader. It is much faster than any of the current music loaders AND it plays AY music perfectly. Altough on my +2 and +2A the volume of it is a bit on the low side (loading sound through beeper is much louder) - this is better on the +2A than they grey +2. And it does seem my connection PC Soundcart -> Speccy is somewhat unstable since it crashes here and there... but it works (more reliable on +2 than +2A).
There's good and then there's-?
<
Does it load 'n' run? As it crashed for me after about 12 mins even on Specemu. Wouldn't mind some of those earlier links being revived as well as I didn't get chance to see 'em.
lol, woody, you are getting better and better every day in this loader biz. it's slooowww but fantastic :)
is it possible to embed audio data into loading stream instead pre-loading all the music? Eg. 1 byte for music data, 1 byte for actual data? or splitting bits 2+6 while loading? please don't laugh, I'm not even sure how many bytes a music sequence cost per second, lol, I'm just improvising.
That way you can play non-repeating song until the end of the loading.
or, it looks like you can create many of the notes with 1 bit square wave loading beeps, with the help of some authoring program and a bizzare loader, it may be possible to embed an beeper music over loading noise. You won't need a special player as it plays well in an ordinary tape anyway.
is it possible to embed audio data into loading stream instead pre-loading all the music? Eg. 1 byte for music data, 1 byte for actual data? or splitting bits 2+6 while loading? please don't laugh, I'm not even sure how many bytes a music sequence cost per second, lol, I'm just improvising.
That way you can play non-repeating song until the end of the loading.
That's likely to make the loader very slow indeed! Assuming you were going to use the full AY capability, you'd be loading 14 bytes of data for the AY registers. What I'm doing here is really just a cheat, calling the real Tube sound driver code between bytes and using a little encoding trick where the 0/1 bits are both the same length on tape so the music plays at a constant speed.
I think what one needs is just a very long tune that never gets around to repeating itself and then preload that first!
or, it looks like you can create many of the notes with 1 bit square wave loading beeps, with the help of some authoring program and a bizzare loader, it may be possible to embed an beeper music over loading noise. You won't need a special player as it plays well in an ordinary tape anyway.
Best example I've seen of that was back in post 61 in this thread :)
Comments
Excellent!!!
'Everyones A Wally' loader is not original game loader, but mine "chaos load".
Wally was choosen because it has mainly monochrome loading pic.
Source for pseudo random pixel routine is on my site, in section about Spectrum screen effects - named 'Random dissolve'.
I sent loader source (with it's saver source) code to Tom-Cat recently. Don't know is it published now somewhere.
A most impressive feat, fantastic.
Although show that to the average C64 fan and you might be in for some trouble. :p
The CSW files do not work in Spin 0.54, I'll have to upgrade.
Woody, what's that suspicious babyonemoretime.mp3 on your website? Not the currah microspeech in action, surely? ;)
piters, very nice loader! Unexpectedly, I couldn't load the tzx in "normal speed" in Spin (latest version). It did load in "Edge Detection" and "flashload" mode though. Very strange....
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
A clue: http://tinyurl.com/26rfg3 :)
Gasman's work. As if I could do something like that... ;)
The loader needs long inverse pulse after the last bit to detect the end of the bit sequence. However this pulse is not present in the TZX file, and the one which ZXDS implicitly generates is not long enough. So one might as well argue that the TZX is flawed, but I will likely work around that in ZXDS anyway...
Thanks.
Patrik
Yes - its on the site in the same archive as the Everyone's a wally :)
Thanx ! :)
TC
Sod trying to write a damn tune :p
*laughing*
Damn my provider, it was. Some of their equipment died and it took them four days to replace it. Go figure.
BTW, in Spin your loader seems to pick the flash bit of the last attribute wrong...
Hence me not calling it special :)
They're quite boring.
Wouldn't you mind visiting the development section and having a go at coding a vu-meter? :)
That is amazing how fast the image loads! And the unusal way it does it! Great stuff!
Hmm, maybe I have not? I do not know actually! :)
Can you name some games which used it?
(And where you saw the screen being drawn? I think most games only let you see the screen once the attributes were loaded.)
Garfield
Fairlight
Cobra
720 degrees
(off the top of my head)
actually you can see the entire list here
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekadv.cgi?what=1®exp=&yrorder=1&year=0&type=0&players=0&memory=0&language=0&country=0&licence=0&publi=0&release=0&format=0&scheme=AL&scorder=1&score=0&have=1&also=1&sort=1&display=1&loadpics=3&mirror=wos
(and, the ones that you see the screen once the attributes are loaded are the later versions of Speedlock)
Or (I think it was the Pacworld demo on a covertape), change both to white, which makes it look like the game isn't loading. If I hadn't left the tape running one time while going off to make a cup of tea, I'd have never realised!
As registered user of Spectaculator I can confirm that Starstrike II loads perfectly (with loading bar progress). But I must add that I use Spectaculator 6.25 (I am not sure for v 6.30).
Yes, true. Side B loads in both 48k and 128k mode. Side A doesn't load. I am using registered version of Spectaculator 6.25.
TC
<
Does it load 'n' run? As it crashed for me after about 12 mins even on Specemu. Wouldn't mind some of those earlier links being revived as well as I didn't get chance to see 'em.
is it possible to embed audio data into loading stream instead pre-loading all the music? Eg. 1 byte for music data, 1 byte for actual data? or splitting bits 2+6 while loading? please don't laugh, I'm not even sure how many bytes a music sequence cost per second, lol, I'm just improvising.
That way you can play non-repeating song until the end of the loading.
or, it looks like you can create many of the notes with 1 bit square wave loading beeps, with the help of some authoring program and a bizzare loader, it may be possible to embed an beeper music over loading noise. You won't need a special player as it plays well in an ordinary tape anyway.
That's likely to make the loader very slow indeed! Assuming you were going to use the full AY capability, you'd be loading 14 bytes of data for the AY registers. What I'm doing here is really just a cheat, calling the real Tube sound driver code between bytes and using a little encoding trick where the 0/1 bits are both the same length on tape so the music plays at a constant speed.
I think what one needs is just a very long tune that never gets around to repeating itself and then preload that first!
Best example I've seen of that was back in post 61 in this thread :)
It works from time to time. I did say it was temperamental!
I'm not really sure what makes it so hit and miss. Certainly the theory behind how it works is sound enough ;)
I'll throw a few of them together into a zip file and upload it in a bit.