Posted By
Ulysses777
on 2024-08-25
18:33:40
|  IRQ Turbo!
 IRQ Turbo is a new turbo tape mastering program, which allows for the playing of music, animations, or even simple games while the main program loads in the background.
The package includes a conversion of the C64 loader game 'Invade-A-Load' as a demonstration of the turbo's capability.
Instructions are provided for creating your own Invade-A-Load tapes and the rest of the turbo functions, so try it out!
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2024-08-25
18:33:40
| Re: IRQ Turbo!
Congratulations; this is a first on Plus/4 
On C64, it was quite common for commercial releases to have music + other nice stuff while loading (here's one example). I guess the reason why this never happened for our computer was the C16: most games were (unfortunately) targeting the 16K models, memory was too precious. The closest thing we got was those cool PETSCII loader screens for games like Kikstart.
But actually playing a little game while loading? What luxury 
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Posted By
Crazy
on 2024-08-26
09:07:08
| Re: IRQ Turbo!
Invaders (Livewire)... 
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2024-08-26
10:49:34
| Re: IRQ Turbo!
That's an excellent point! I'm honestly shocked that we missed this. The topic of "were the loaders that played music" came up in 2019, check that discussion - we concluded that the closest thing was Rabló-Rulett.
But oops, Invaders (Livewire)... Well, it's not exactly music, but definitely looks like an IRQ loader, with sound effects and a "blocks to load" countdown. And the notes for the game clearly say so  (I checked the logs, that comment was added by MIK in 2014. He has an extensive collection of cassettes.)
BTW, both games are from 1987, so without know the month, I'm not sure which one was truly the first. Nevertheless, Ulysses777's turbo is really cool
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Posted By
Ulysses777
on 2024-08-26
11:45:41
| Re: IRQ Turbo!
Just to explain what Invaders (Livewire) does: the loader itself is a regular Supersoft turbo often found in Kingsoft games, except that instead of changing the border colour, it takes the hardware cursor flash value from $FF1F, shifts the bits left, then puts it in the $FF0E sound frequency.
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Posted By
Verona
on 2024-08-26
17:48:27
| Re: IRQ Turbo!
Another great thing to us. Not just for C64.
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2024-10-07
12:16:07
| Re: IRQ Turbo!
I'm gonna resurrect this topic and mention one more game, just for the sake of completeness: Rodmän was commercially released and it has an IRQ loader (no music though!).
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2024-10-21
15:34:04
| Re: IRQ Turbo!
Written by you, no less Unfortunately we don't have that - the TAP file on the site appears to be recorded without any turbo.
I guess we'll have to see if someone has a copy of the original (turbo version) and would be kind enough to archive it for us.
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Posted By
Luca
on 2024-10-21
16:01:06
 | Re: IRQ Turbo!
I tagged the TAP files as "Name Your Price version", that was their source from the itch.io site og the author himself.
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