Posted By
Mad
on 2017-05-06
17:11:43
|  Re: Trackloader For The Masses, Not The Classes
Just my 2 cents: I know that the porting of my games caused some trouble and perhaps this is the aftermath of it. That I had to add a SD2IEC Kernal loader was just no fun at all, since the games and demos also used the lower pages for code and it was really tricky to find the memory addresses which the Kernal Loader overwrites. Saying that, the main problem I faced with the Kernal loader was, that it caused some sei/cli commands which resulted in flickering of the loading screens, since I had to use irqs there.
To make it short, for me the main purpose of a track loader is not speed, it's the possibility to load in the background. Which is not fully given by the Kernal ones, they do restrict the on frame interrupt (and cause this sei/cli flickering) duration, too.
On C64 there is the Turbo Chameleon 64 which is somewhat "like" the SD2IEC but emulates a full floppy drive, too. So they don't have the problem anymore, a Chameleon seems to be pretty expensive sadly, too. (Don't know if the options siz mentioned also emulate a full floppy drive.)
Doing the Kernal stuff for all of my "products" was somehow the worst part of making them. I spend many hours figuring out what went wrong with the Kernal routines. And it was no fun at all, however I also learnt a little. Just remember making a product only for the SD2IEC would be also a no go, but perhaps possible. As said, using the Kernal routines is very bad from a programmers perspective, e.g. you have to wait several minutes for loading of a level on the 1541.. Or even the restriction for the interrupts to reside below $8000 and other ram/rom relations.
I just understand Bubis that he made some major effort to bring something nice to the plus/4 and got the response that he better should haven't done it, which is also somewhat embarassing and funny (no offence). As Luca said, the scene consists of different types of people, however from my perception the scene here is consisting of around 20 people (could be wrong) and telling some of them they should haven't done something if it's actually a plus for the options of any programmer on the plus/4 is not the best response Bubis could get for it.
Yes some people do have a SD2IEC and some people other hardware but that should not be a limiting factor on the options the other people have. I would be happy with a Trackloader which supports SD2IEC and 1551, too. However that doesn't seem to be in reach. So I stick to the currently "crappy" options for these devices (e.g. Kernal Loading).
However I wan't to do some stuff (e.g. displaying/animating something) while the demos or games are loading. So there is currently no other way else then using the current tackloaders anyway. Just anyone remember, that your hardware setup is not the only one!
And please don't take it to personal, as Luca said, the plus/4 scene isn't about fighting anything at all. That's not "CSDB like territory".
So be happy and enjoy this nice (here rainy) day!
ps: If I got some facts wrong, sorry. I just wanted to tell my view of the current loading systems on plus/4. And gerliczer I do also understand your point.
edit: Forgive me what I said about the CSDB, but sometimes there seem to be hard fights about a single "nop" or some missing credit there.. :)
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