[Coco] tape format and .cas file problems

[Roger Taylor]

The Impossiball game is quite impressive for a tape file.  It 
auto-starts and also shows a countdown timer on the screen while it's loading.

The file has no silence gaps in it, just a real long initial leader 
with a glitch of data sound in the middle of it followed by 
data.  Wierd.  Oh well, it works.






At 02:14 PM 11/19/2008, you wrote:
>Roger Taylor wrote:
> > At 08:38 AM 11/19/2008, you wrote:
> >
> > Probably overkill.  Also, CLOADM only supports one start address as
> > far as I recall.  This means the entire ML program has to be
> > contiguous, unlike the multi-record LOADM format which can jump all
> > around RAM doing what it wants.
> >
> > I remember back in the 80's seeing Rainbow magazine ads selling CoCo
> > tricks like "Auto executing tape programs" but I could be wrong.  I'd
> > like to know how a lowly 16k or even 4k CoCo 1 could do this just by
> > typing CLOADM.  I don't see anything in the tape format that allows
> > for such a trick.
>
>A pretty standard trick that I've used myself is to have the first loaded
>binary patch over either the area of RAM that executes "next statement"
>or the IRQ vectors or similar.  Loading multiple blocks is fairly easy
>once you've got your initial autorun.
>
>I've also, oddly enough, used this to make loading quicker:
>
>http://www.6809.org.uk/tmp/da/impossiball-coco.wav.gz
>http://www.6809.org.uk/tmp/da/utopia-coco.wav.gz
>
>With some notes on what it does here:
>
>http://www.6809.org.uk/tmp/da/utopia_iball_coco.txt
>
>..ciaran
>--
>Ciaran Anscomb, Perl/C Hacker
>
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-- 
Roger Taylor

http://www.wordofthedayonline.com