Music during loading. Is it possible? | MSX Resource Center (Page 2/3)

Champion (341)

25-10-2021, 23:55

Everyone is forgetting the Musical loaders for the CPC. They use a special loader that was a nightmare to get working in TZXDuino and were only used in a few Firebird games. Thrust, Harvey Headbanger, and a few others. There is also the Breaking Baud Demo but that's slightly different.

I'm not sure if the Spectrum had any commercial games with loading music though.

Par Timmy

Master (200)

26-10-2021, 01:43

CASDuino wrote:

I'm not sure if the Spectrum had any commercial games with loading music though.

No, not really. All the loading sounds are already put through to the speaker, so any music will be drown out by the tape sounds. We had loading games instead. (or loading screens, or screens loading in different ways, or speed loaders, or a countdown on screen, and many other ways.) These are all created by writing their own tape loader.

Par snake

Expert (71)

26-10-2021, 21:43

Short answer: NO

Mass storage devices access is performed through bios, and these bios routines work only when interrupt is disabled.

Par gdx

Enlighted (6219)

27-10-2021, 02:34

santiontanon wrote:

It is definitively possible, since if I don't remember wrong, the "Mutant Zone" game for MSX1 id it! (I'm speaking from memory, so, I might be wrong)

Mutant Zone is a game on tape.

MSXs do not have non-maskable interrupts. Disk-ROM disables the interrupts too frequently to get a proper music except maybe by little loading as it goes along on a very fast disk.

Some demos play music while loading thanks to the MSX-Audio which has a dedicated memory to play a sample independently. A sample is played in loop during the loading.

Par Timmy

Master (200)

27-10-2021, 03:35

While I'm here...

Since all I had were spectrum games on tape, how fast was loading an MSX game from disk?

Is it more like seconds, or minutes?

(I assume rom cartridges are loaded instantly?)

Par gdx

Enlighted (6219)

27-10-2021, 10:12

Loading a game on tape takes approximately between 1 and 30 minutes.
On floppy disk, between 3 and 40 seconds.
On flash card, between 0.5 and 5 seconds.

Par santiontanon

Paragon (1807)

27-10-2021, 19:24

Woah, 30 minutes for a tape game?! which would that one be? Assuming MSX1 games (not sure if there are MSX2 or higher games on tape), loading 64KB from a tape should not take more than 5 - 10mins, so maybe some games had very poor loaders?

Par CASDuino

Champion (341)

27-10-2021, 19:31

santiontanon wrote:

Woah, 30 minutes for a tape game?! which would that one be? Assuming MSX1 games (not sure if there are MSX2 or higher games on tape), loading 64KB from a tape should not take more than 5 - 10mins, so maybe some games had very poor loaders?

Level 9 adventures can take a while but not quite 30. Feel like a lifetime though.

There are a very very few MSX2 games on tape.

Par TheKid

Paragon (1238)

27-10-2021, 19:48

The tape games Flight deck and musics also took a long time (approx 15 minutes). And after that time sometimes there was a load error, you hadto tamper with the head position and try again. I remember i had a philips tape player with a switch fir that and i made notes for what setting the games needed. Ffww, long time ago. I was so happy they invented diskdrives

Par Wlcracks

Hero (566)

28-10-2021, 14:32

I think all Aackosoft had this custom tape loader. Like save"cas:" it was cut in blocks with every block had its own header. I think they though, this was a copy protection. bload you could copy by getting the addresses in the header. The real copy protection for Aackosoft games; the games were to shitty to take effort to copy them. Loading times about 15 minutes i guess for 64kb games. Oh-shit was ok though.