Homesoft Menu's.....3

[carmel_andrews]

I notice on some of the early Homesoft menu's (the ones with the thin/thick colour bars going down the screen), advertised themselves as 'turbo' versions

 

I am assuming that by 'turbo' they refer to the fact it takes less time to load a turbo version then a normal xex or atr file

 

Actually, there's very little difference betw. a turbo version or a normal xex/atr because the time taken of the turboversion screen to disapear and the game screen or depacking to start compared to the normal xex or atr would have already loaded and started

 

Is that why homesoft decided to change menu's again to the one were you just press a key to skip the homesoft menu/screen

[Rybags]

Those stupid decompressors were often a mystery to me.

 

People went to the trouble to develop fastload routines for the C-64, Amiga and ST, only to render them useless by having a depack which often took as long as the load itself.

 

Fair enough if disk space conservation is vital - but a waste of time in most other cases.

[TMR]

Is that why homesoft decided to change menu's again to the one were you just press a key to skip the homesoft menu/screen

 

i've always assumed it was to bring the Homesoft crack intros into line with those on other platforms myself; the logo/text lines/scroller intro is pretty much a standard, although the lack of music was always something i personally found quite odd...

 

Fair enough if disk space conservation is vital - but a waste of time in most other cases.

 

Nail, head, thwack. =-) Cracked games on just about any platform were distributed either on floppies via mail or, as time progressed, over international phone connections with modems; the longer the file or files involved, the more disk space it required (meaning there was less on a spread disk) or the longer it took to transfer (and the more places there were to introduce errors). In particular, disks were at a premium for a lot of mail swappers simply because they handled so many so the more that could be crammed onto each one the better. C64 spread disks didn't usually have menus (i sent mine out with the Mad Mekon Cracking Zero Blocks Boot installed for a while, but i was in a minority) but they were crammed to the limit with files.

 

Depending on the decruncher, some schemes were better than others but it was a software evolution as happens with anything like that and eventually the earlier crunchers like the Final Supercompressor were superceded by faster, more powerful tools that also didn't take as long to actually compress the file; for a long time, my C64 tool of choice was TimeCruncher 5 which, even in 2MHz mode on my C128, took a couple of hours on a large file.