On my reasoning behind single load cracks

[Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co>]

I got to thinking, and I discussed some of this in an e-mail exchange with 
someone else here last night - so what use are these single load cracks 
anyway?

Well, back in the day we all had 5.25" drives, and lots of blank disks, 
and the first single-load cracks let us stuff 3-5 games on each side of a 
disk.  (Some of them depended on the DOS and are thus still chained to 
5.25" floppy but can now be stuffed on a disk with other games.)

Then came 3.5" floppies and hard drives, and it started to become more 
difficult to find 5.25" type.  I think now you can't even get them except 
as NOS (New Old Stock), or just plain *used*.  Of course that means other 
routes have to be taken for backing up and playing those disk games, when 
you can't find disks, and the Apples, built like tanks as they are, are 
still working!

In the near future, there are other media, and they can be used with 
ProDOS-8.  That's usually enough.  (And with the compressed games, it's 
even more "enough" as the issue of games loading over BASIC.SYSTEM or 
needing to put code below $0800 is no longer important when compressed and 
starting at $0801!)

Even this isn't going to hold out forever, with the way things are going 
in the world of Flash storage.  But one thing will: the headphone jack. 
Any single-load game, packed with exomizer/automizer2, will be loadable 
for a long foreseeable future, from as little as an mp3 player or a cell 
phone plugged into the back of the computer, by just typing

  ]LOAD

and playing the file.  (Even better if an addon to RockBox would allow the 
raw output of Automiz2 to be converted to sound on the fly.)

-uso.