Ok, I'm back on Onslaught again after a little Christmas hiatus.

I was recently furnished with a lovely title screen by DaveJ, and as a little diversion this evening, I decided to see if the Beeb was up to the idea of a "turbo loader" from tape, using this screen as a test.

Here are the results - combining a custom tape format (without inter-block gaps) with LZ compression (which is decompressed on-the-fly), a Mode 5 title screen loads in around 30 seconds! I didn't bother to time the regular loading, but it's significantly slower.

to run both samples.

So I thought maybe it'd be a useful thing for any future RetroSoftware releases (are they even released on tape?).

But here's the million dollar question: does it actually run on a real Beeb (it works fine in B-Em and BeebEm)? If anyone's possibly able to check this (perhaps using FreeUEF by Thomas Harte), it'd be great to know. I'll build better error handling into the loader when I know that it definitely works.

I always liked the idea of giving Onslaught a 'proper' release (even with its own protection system, to keep the hackers happy too), so this is the first step towards that!

Will update the diary with progress soon.

Happy New Year y'all!

Wow

That's absolutely incredible! I think it loads faster than the RS tape loader header thing! I wouldn't have believed a Beeb could load a screen that fast from tape.

Haha, ace. I've been wondering also if RS are doing any cassette releases...

Hmmm I'm not sure - I think it was definitely planned at some point, because Tom knocked up a standard tape loader for those who wanted it.

Out of interest, last night I added my latest build of Onslaught to the tape loader, and the whole thing, including the title screen, loads in about 2 minutes! It's definitely a shame that nobody tried this kind of scheme back in the day, because it makes tape loading completely tolerable!

Tut.

Look closely!

Aha! Glad to see they're being supported! I knew Zap was on tape, but with all this focus on disc versions, I thought that perhaps the tape versions had been quietly dropped

Dave(M), if you're interested in mastering future tape releases with this kind of loader, give me a shout and we can arrange it (if indeed it actually works on real hardware) - the difference in loading time is incredible, although it doesn't have the security of the standard Acorn loader where you can retry loading individual blocks (but then, on C64/Speccy you could never do that!).

Hopefully the next RS release will be Onslaught of course! Unless Mountain Panic's coming to a close?

Nice one - I can use the loader too if we go with it.



It's about 75% done. All the screens and graphics are in, but no sound and enemy population needs doing, although I have to address some memory issues before that can start. Hesitant to give a date though as I don't get much chance to work on it.

How far you off?

Hard to say - the 'guts' of the game are done, i.e. the basic mechanics, optimised collision detection, rendering, sound/music engine + in-game tune. Now the aim is to keep adding new types of creatures and new screens until I run out of memory! Also I need to rework the scenery graphics, and add a title page - and perhaps add some new gameplay features, e.g. a bonus round, or bonus collectables.

I reckon maybe it'll be finished to my satisfaction in a few months, but I know how bad I am for constantly tweaking and making improvements, instead of putting my foot down and declaring it finished!

Oh yeah, and then I need to work on the protection system

And the Electron version

Oooh, can I nab some code for sound/music?

Yeah, sure! It's all direct sound chip stuff, but when you're ready, give me a shout and I'll pass the code your way! It also contains the routines which synthesise bass notes for lower pitches than those that the sound chip can normally emit.

The music code is not particularly generic (I tailored it specifically to my in-game tune), but it could be made generic fairly easily.

Nice one Rich, cheers!

Bit late to the discussion, but ...

hmm ... perhaps we could have the fast loader on side A and the regular version on side B for maximum compatibility? Unless we're doing BBC micro one side, Electron the other ... depends on the title, I suppose.

Sam.

Hey Sam,

Welcome back from holidays! (and thanks for fixing polls and the BeebSpriter stuff!)

Yeah, I'd already thought of that - if there's no Electron version, then that works nicely. Anyway, sometime I'll revisit it and see if I can build a basic block system into it, and maybe a little bit of visual feedback. For now though, it's just good to know that it's actually possible!