bjonte

A terrible job. It doesn’t even try to and says so clearly in the manual. It mimics the sector layout and if a program is using the kernal to access sectors it will be reasonbly compatible (but faster). But the hardware is different. I/O register layouts and CPU speed is different so as soon as you send code to the drive to do something (like turbo loaders do), you need to do something specific for the CMD HD.

Bruce Lee II. There are turbo loader systems around with support for CMD HD so games using them can at least be copied to the drive and started from there.

I agree the prices are through the roof, but the CMD HD has more to offer than SD2IEC. The HD has a CPU that can be programmed like any other old school drive so applications can use this to load in the background without hickups. It also supports parallel loading through the RAMLink.

Game support for SuperCPU isn’t common. Most won’t work in a way that makes sense if they work at all. The reason is that they haven’t been written in a way that takes varying CPU speed into account. Making games for the SuperCPU falls into two categories - making for the SuperCPU or making it work on the SuperCPU. Making it work is a lot easier. You just need to make sure to disable the turbo speed whenever you need the speed of the CPU to be deterministic and that no illegal opcodes are used. Any cycle exact code, like turbo loading from disk or raster effects can be affected. You also need to make sure it is timed against something deterministic, like the screen update or timers. Making it specifically for the SuperCPU is a bit more work since you need to program it in 65816 assembler to get most out of it (but you don’t need to). Using the 65816 unlocks the use of extra RAM, if you have access to it. The downside is that this processor has a significant pitfall with its 8 or 16 bit mode that will likely cause you a lot of surprising crashes on the road ahead. I’ll also warn you that if you make a game for the SuperCPU you will undoubtly be criticized with arguments like ”this can be done without SuperCPU”. Making productivity applications is a lot easier. Everything will just be faster and depending on the model you can make small adjustments to gain a lot of speed (telling it where the VIC chip is looking basically). You don’t need to program the 65816 for the super speed.

Don’t send the crack. It removes the background loading, which is a bit of a loss.

Nice of you to help out OLD CS1!

Haha, you beat me to it.

Explore the add-on options and if it looks too difficult maybe someone can send you a physical disk. Which country do you live in? Maybe there’s an active Commodore club that can assist?

You can browse to https://deepsid.chordian.net/ and filter on the tag ”cover”.

The ultimate solution is still the 1541 ultimate series if you need a modern mass storage device. 1541 Ultimate. 1541 Ultimate II or 1541 Ultimte II+. That’s my recommendation until Pi1541 gets better.

Well, it could be. It’s just unlikely. If you can load the first file and start it but the demo locks up when it starts then I’d say it’s not compatible.

The mistake is probably that you’re using SD2IEC. It doesn’t replicate the CPU in the drive that demos use to communicate with in order to load in the background without hickups.

It’s just another type of memory expansion. There’s nothing GEOS-specific with it really.

It might be possible to bump the head in the other direction to align it again. I’ve done it before with success, but not without special software.

Remove all spaces in the program. PRINT# is a command. The # is not an argument.

I haven’t seen any expander that can run with any pair of cartridges (address space not colliding) without problems. Is there a solution for this?

It seems like it’s a couple of people trying to steal the brand and build things using it.

How about JiffyDOS? I haven’t tried but I would be surprised if that wouldn’t work.

Oh, interesting! I was assuming things because I heard the Mega65 keyboard is a good one and the Spectrum Next managed to keep the price so low. Well, my bad and good for you!

And just like the old days I bet the Spectrum has the worse keyboard. [emoji1]

The Mega65 is more accessible for homebrewing than DTV since the DTV has to be rebuilt to run your own software. It could make it a bit more attractive to new software development.

Jam It and Volley for Two could be potential candidates.

In general, the custom loaders just send their own drive code to the drive RAM and execute it. So JiffyDOS won’t be in the way there. However, the kernal ROM has been modified so if you call kernal stuff without using the standard system vectors, you may make your program incompatible.

There are interesting contenders though. Z64k is a closed source java application. It is slower than VICE and I don’t know how good the emulation of the C64 is but it has more accurate C128 emulation than VICE. Denise is an emulator that reduces input lag by emulating frames into the future for a limited set of input variations. Quite interesting feature.

Considering the desire by companies to ”reboot” a series and cause confusion about the name, I predict the next xbox will be called ”Original Xbox”.