Tip For Fast Loading St Games


frolik

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This may seem obvious to some, but I find it very useful:

Save a state of the game you just loaded and save it as a filename with the new keyboard savestate namer, then you can load it directly without waiting for the disk to load from scratch and it's much faster.

Works great if it's a single load game (one that doens't access the disk once loaded) - then you can even delete the original disk and keep the savestate which is a much smaller file....

tada!

(sorry again if it's obvious!)
 
does this work in frodo as well? a 64MB savestate would be a helluva lot better than a 170MB .D64...
 
toxibunny posted on Mar 11 2005 at 06:54 AM said:
does this work in frodo as well?  a 64MB savestate would be a helluva lot better than a 170MB .D64...


uhh... MB?.... thats quite big games and save states you have to your frodo :rolleyes:

sorry, just had to comment :p . I don´t know the answere to your question thou.....

(I know, in a time when games can take up Giga Bytes it can be hard to belive there were once games that only was in a few kilo bytes....... but I guess you just didn´t think about it...)
 
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toxi -- those would be KB and not MB :)

CaSTaway compresses (zips) the main ST RAM; so a ST floppy is usually 360 or 720k (or thereabouts depending), and is loaded into ST RAM (1MB); then I compress it down to 200-300k :)

jeff
 
toxibunny posted on Mar 11 2005 at 04:54 PM said:
does this work in frodo as well? a 64MB savestate would be a helluva lot better than a 170MB .D64...

Yes I do the same thing in frodo, but the saves are very unreliable - if they work once you reboot then they'll be ok.

If you want to cut down the size of your D64's you can remove the PRG file from inside with Star Commander (or Total Commander with the D64 decompression plugin) but this only works with games that are stored in one PRG file (multiload games will have many PRG's)
 
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for multiload games (C64) which doesn't take the space of a whole disk, it must be possible o convert them into a .t64 file. the t64 file is just as big as the files it contains.
i tried some tools, but couldn't find a good one.

any suggestions?
 
well I've found out an awful lot about the way C64 emulation works, and I don't think T64 files are really used for multiload, meaning you have to use a D64 with the space wasteage. Ideally adding zip support to frodo would fix this.

There might be some cartridges out there that can convert multiload games, I use action replay but there's nothing for multiload.
 
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