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Released by :
Wil
Release Date :
2 April 2022
Type :
C64 Tool
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Released At :
Vintage Computing Carinthia $17
Credits :
Download :
Look for downloads on external sites:
Pokefinder.org
Summary
Submitted by wil on 2 April 2022
== What is this? ==
A wrapper for dreamload to increase loading speed of multifile games, especially for web-published C64 games.
== Motivation for this work ==
When distributing some of my games via a web player (basically a C64 and VC1541 emulator in html5) the long loading times where problematic. Back in the days, we knew that we either use a floppy speeder or we had to bear a loading time of around 2 minutes, but people browsing the web don't have this kind of patience. For single filers, it is possible to inject the data into RAM upon startup, but when multiple files are needed, the web-based emulators typically load everything from the disk. To shorten the loading time and make the waiting time more bearable, deltaV combines a fastloader with a progress bar that shows loading progress in real time. I decided to use the dreamload loader because it is compatible with different drives, including SD2IEC. Thus the game will run on all kinds of hardware. Dreamload's Achilles' heel is that it only works with a simple drive connected. That's to be addressed another time.
== Steps to add deltaV as a preloader ==
1. There are at least 11 blocks free on the disk with the program to be loaded
2. Prerequisite for building: cc65: https://cc65.github.io/, LAMAlib: https://github.com/demesos/LAMAlib, Exomizer V3.1.1 and make installed
3. Determine the filename to load
4. Determine the length of the file in byte. If you cannot measure it exactly, a good guess is the number of blocks times 254 minus 127.
5. Decide what message should appear during loading
6. Determine the starting address of the loaded file
7. Put information from 1.-4. into file user_config.inc
8. Assemble the preloader with make
9. Put the file preloader as the first file on disk
10. (optional) rename the preloader program to indicate that the user should load this file first
The enclosed example shows the application of deltaV to the game Survival Messenger Adventure
== Technical details ==
Used memory configuration:
dloadC000_FD00.prg Config:
Loader installer $c000 - $cd96
Buffer for a sector $fd00 - $fdff
deltaV code $cf00 - $cfff ;maximum 255 bytes
Loaded Program $0801 - $ceff ;maximum $c6ff bytes, 200 Blocks
== Acknowledgments ==
Thanks to Doc Bacardi and Ninja of The Dreams for the dreamload loadersystem and to Zagon for exomizer.
== Ideas for future work ==
* Autostart for deltaV
* Fancier progress animations |
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