Supercharger autoloading (and random access)

[mos6507]

Normally multiload games are loaded sequentially so if you had them on your PC it would look like this:

 

MINDMAST1.BIN

MINDMAST2.BIN

MINDMAST3.BIN

 

Then when you play a game, all you see is the PLAY TAPE message. You have to know from context (the current load) which file to load via Playbin or a CD player (i.e. currentload+1). You have to do this manually. New homebrews would be limited to sequential multiloads because there is no way to visually indicate which load to queue up unless you also wedged in a manual pre-load display to tell the user. The CC1 displays the requested load ID visually which is an improvement. CC2 autoloads from flash.

 

Some time ago, I postulated that it should be possible to write Supercharger homebrews that the even the original Supercharger (or CC1) could autoload, and do random access loads to boot.

 

The plan was to bit-bang small messages through the second controller port to a host PC. I found a program called Tera Term that had a scripting language that looked like it could handle it. I also built a dongle and successfully got bytes written using a little serial subroutine that someone graciously wrote on Stellalist (Fred Quimby and others helped). But that's where it ended up. However, I now got it working. I think... I would still need a test program to know for sure, but in theory this should work, and work well.

 

Basically it implements a poor-man's read-only filesystem, only as much as required for multiload games.

 

Here is the command structure:

 

Each command is a single character followed by a CR/LF. Then you send the argument and terminate with CR/LF.

 

"D" "L" "M" "T"

 

D[CR/LF][DIRECTORY STRING][CR/LF] = set current load directory

L[CR/LF][LOADIDBYTE][CR/LF] = perform load

M[CR/LF][DIRECTORY STRING][CR/LF] = set game's master directory

T[CR/LF][GAME TITLE][CR/LF] = set game's title (all loads use this as a naming convention)

 

 

By default, if all you use is the [L]oad function, all loads have to be in the format LOAD1.BIN, LOAD2.BIN, LOAD3.BIN.

 

If you set the game title to LEPRECHAUN, then it switches to LEPRECHAUN1.BIN, LEPRECHAUN2.BIN, LEPRECHAUN3.BIN.

 

All these loads default to the master directory as defined by the Tera Term script.

 

If you set the master folder, then they will switch to that.

 

If you set the load directory, then that would be a subdirectory underneath the master folder.

 

So if your game had one set of loads, you might arrange all of them in a single master folder.

 

If your game had "level-packs" then you could arrange them each in their own subfolder.

 

That way you can easily break out of the 256 level limit.

 

 

So the prerequisites for using this system are (microsoft windows):

 

Supercharger or Cuttle Cart

joystick serial dongle

TeraTerm

supercharger_autoload.ttl script

SendSCLoad.bat batchfile

makewav

playwav

 

 

I'll package this stuff up and make a posting on my blog for anyone who wants to try it out.

 

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;showentry=3982

Edited October 7, 2007 by mos6507