Quick as a flash A lot of work went into the game and this shows t right from the moment that you start to load it. The program uses a system called "Flashload" - a high speed loader. All recent Virgin games use some kind of high speed loader. This was essential with the Commodore 64 which loads at about a third of the speed of an Amstrad speedwrite 0 program. So although the need was not so great on the Amstrad, it was decided that the 2K of memory used by the tape buffer was too valuable to waste and so some kind of custom loader was required. This caused a lot of problems and only came right in the end. The original idea was to load at 4K baud (four times speedwrite 0) but whilst this was okay most of the time, it proved too unreliable to be used in the manufacture of a large quantity of tapes. The speed was cut down “bit by bit'until a reliable enough result was obtained. The production tapes load at 2.5K baud but without the usual gaps between blocks. Even so it is a large game and takes a while to load. The possibility of a disc version is a sore point, since their disc drives were still on order. The whole game was developed using a tape based system and Devpac. | ★ AMSTRAD CPC ★ A voir aussi sur CPCrulez , les sujets suivants pourront vous intéresser... |
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