Emulator roms and cloading speed

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Hialmar
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Emulator roms and cloading speed

Post by Hialmar »

I have noted that some roms actually load tapes way slower than others.

The basic11b.rom found in oricutron's releases loads tapes very fast (in fact it's almost instantaneous) while another one I found in xeuphoric called atmos.rom is so slow that it reminds me of the real tape loading of old.
The MICRODISC.rom found in oricutron's releases has the slow loading code as well.

Are there some where the tape loading code has been modified ?

If anyone has a microdisc rom with a fast tape loading code I'm interested as it would be way easier in order to move programs from tape images to disk images.
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Re: Emulator roms and cloading speed

Post by ibisum »

I seem to remember reading that during the French years of the Atmos scene, there were fixes to the tape-loading bugs, finally, in limited distribution. I wish I had the chops to dump the ROM's, find the tape-routines, and do a diff .. I'm not sure if I can find the references to the French fixes, however .. maybe someone else knows better details.
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Re: Emulator roms and cloading speed

Post by Godzil »

ibisum wrote:I seem to remember reading that during the French years of the Atmos scene, there were fixes to the tape-loading bugs, finally, in limited distribution. I wish I had the chops to dump the ROM's, find the tape-routines, and do a diff .. I'm not sure if I can find the references to the French fixes, however .. maybe someone else knows better details.
The french Atmos have the same one as the UK : 1.1b

The only change they made are adding some hardware stuff for more reliable loading, but not quicker.

The only thing that may happen to oricutron is that it path the rom on the fly and if it done not now this specific rom version it won't patch it and load with the slow method.
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Re: Emulator roms and cloading speed

Post by Xeron »

Oricutron has turbotape patches for known ROMs. If some ROMs load tapes slowly, it is because Oricutron doesn't know how to patch that ROM. If it doesn't know how to patch it, it falls back to emulating a real tape (and hence loads at tape speeds, but you can use warp speed to counter that to a degree).

If this "atmos.rom" is just the standard atmos rom, then I don't see why you would want to use it instead of basic11b.rom, which is also just the standard atmos rom. However, if you're really keen to use it, making a copy of "basic11b.pch" in the roms directory with the name "atmos.pch" would allow turbotape to work.
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Re: Emulator roms and cloading speed

Post by Xeron »

Another thing: MICRODIS.ROM doesn't have any tape loading code in it. The normal ROM is still used. If tape loading is slow, I suspect something has copied the ROM into overlay RAM, and Oricutron would therefore not do the turbotape patch (and nor should it; it would have to compare the ram every instruction to see if it was still a copy of the rom!)
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Re: Emulator roms and cloading speed

Post by Hialmar »

Thanks for the explanations.

In fact I downloaded the Atmos.rom file for Euphoric and I shared the roms/tapes/disks directories between euphoric and oricutron. But the basic11b.rom works well with both emulators so no problem there.

I use the Sedoric3 disk image found on Fabrice's website. I will try to find another one to see if it doesn't copy the ROM in the overlay RAM.
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Re: Emulator roms and cloading speed

Post by Xeron »

Ahh OK, I see. If you did want to just use the Euphoric rom set, you can just copy the ".pch" and ".sym" files from Oricutron into the shared rom directory, and rename them where necessary to match up with the Euphoric rom naming conventions (although weirdly, I think I got the original ROMs and filenames FROM euphoric, so I dunno why they're different).
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