Turbo Maker
A cheap and cheerful Turbo Loader for any Spectrum
By Lee Tonks
(C)2004, Cheese Freak Software
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back when in the 'good old days' before Bill and
Windows and everything, computers were great. Especially my trusty Spectrum,
which I still love dearly. Sadly, loading games wasn't so great - we only
really had tapes and it took ages. At some point in the dim and distant past,
I discovered an article in Crash magazine which talked about how to alter the
ROM using a Multiface and its 'shadow' memory. One of the things it described
was how to alter the ROM load and save routines to speed them up - effectively
a cheap and cheerful turbo-loader.
That very article is here, if you're interested:
http://simon.mooli.org.uk/AF/article/TechTips31.html
Fascinated, I made it work. Then I figured it would be great to use the same
principles to make a 'proper' turbo loader which could be loaded anywhere in
memory without a multiface. So that's what I did! I also created a BASIC
'creator' program which would generate a custom turbo-loader for you.
A while back, I rediscovered this and used it to make a turbo-load version of
my Manic Miner remix, Tales From A Parallel Universe. I then decided to
release the creator program to the world, but... discovered it was a bit crap.
I decided to rewrite it, and Turbo Maker is the result.
Using it is a bit involved, so I won't go into it here, but needless to say there's a full instructions file included with the download which should help you through. Creating a loader is easy, assembling the actual data is the hard part. But you'll get the hang of it, I'm sure. ;-)
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