| Author: | hyper active (registered user: 296 posts ) |
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| Date: | Sun, Jun 13th, 2010 @ 06:01 ( . ) |
Update! Warning, the following maybe a lot of guesswork on my part, but it all seems to fit. further experimentation leads me to believe that my particular drive cannot handle fast head movement speeds. to explain what I mean, here's the following taken from the star commander help file. Head movement speed This option controls the speed of the stepper motor in the Commodore drive. A lower value makes head movement faster, thus speeding up file and disk copy a bit. However, a too low value may make the drive unable to seek correctly. The default value is 32. What the cyan loader appears to do is change the head speed of the stepper motor, setting it to about 16, and some drives are unable to cope with such a fast speed where as other drives can function without any issues. . I tried lowering the value in the star commander setup program from the default of 32, and the lower it went, the harder it became for my 1541 drive to read disks reliably. As for the inability to load some cyan-protected titles on a c128, it is not the drive that is at fault, but the c128 machine itself, and to my knowledge there is nothing that can be done to remedy this situation, but feel free to correct me if otherwise. It looks like there are not 2, but in fact 3 versions of the loader program that did the rounds. the first version I'll call 1.0 had a signature on track 40, and would crash if loaded on a c128. This was used on a few gremlin graphics and US gold titles. This includes the pal edditions of games like ace of aces, avenger, bulldog and express raider the second version I'll call 1.5 substitutes the signature on track 40 for a weak bit on track 31 or 32, but it exhibits the same anti-c128 policy as with version 1.0. This version was used on a small number of titles such as armageddon man, alternative world games and cosmic causeway, I was unable to even get these titles working on ccs64 or hoxs64. I'll call this next Version 2.0 because it is a major improvement over 1.0 and 1.5. It will load up on both 128 and 64 machines. This version is used on many games such as action fighter, black tiger, blues brothers, dream warrior, lazer tag and night rider. another possibility is that I could be wrong entirely about the 1.5 version of the cyan loader. I have encountered some titles that will dy on you after they are loaded a certain number of times, they were lazer tag and way of the tiger. Once this limit has been reached, the game will just crash and refuse to load. I'll need to do some more tests, also I'll have to see if my friend still has his old 1541 drive and find out if loading the suspect games on another 1541 will yield the same results. Watch this space! |
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