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Re: Revenge of "Apple Crunch"



On Wed, 14 Jan 2009, BLuRry wrote:


On Jan 14, 9:04 pm, lyricalnanoha
<lyricalnan...@usotsuki.hoshinet.org> wrote:

I'm gonna do a rerelease of Apple Crunch.  I've recompressed a bunch of
the games, recracked a couple, reripped a few more.

Though, I really don't like the menus I'm capable of doing in the current
system. :(  And since I keep the files as BASIC-type (it makes them easier
to handle), I can't use Beautiful Boot without hacking them.

Here's my questions:

1. Does anyone know how I might go about doing something like Beautiful
Boot - a menu with a fastloader that runs in HGR mode - but with the
ability to run BASIC programs as well as binary?  My current approach is
to use RDOS 3.3.


Executing a basic program as a binary is pretty easy... (once you know
about the onerr flag anyway)

So you could shove this loader somewhere low in memory like $300 or
you could pre-pend it to the beginning of the basic file.  This is
exactly what I use for AGS to execute basic programs and it seems to
work pretty well.  I set LOMEM to START+SIZE+1 and HIMEM to DOS -1
(and if you don't care about DOS, then just DFFF).   I have a feeling
that what you're doing probably doesn't matter too much if LOMEM or
HIMEM are set -- but I could be mistaken.
What I wanted to do was leave the file as BASIC, - it's actually a binary file in drag, but I wanted to leave it this way as it's more convenient for me. (And seems that it would be more convenient for others. You can't run a binary file from the Finder, and some people have preferred the Apple Crunch versions of certain games on that account too. 




2. Recommendations - if anyone's seen the Crunch disks, are there any good
single-load games I lack?  (And where might they be found on Asimov?)


Holy cow, goodness no.  There's over 256 of those things, and many
gems among them.  I'd be hard-pressed to complain without feeling like
a total jerk for doing so.  ;-)


Yeah.  I only know a small handful of the good games.
For the record - am I right in guessing Impossible Mission is single-load? But I can't get the damn thing into a workable PG2 (either before or after compression, and I know I have to step on DOS)... 


I am using the same compressor I used originally (Exomizer 2.0), but with
a series of new conversion tools that makes the process mostly automated
and painless.  The main program is one I wrote, "bincvtii", and is capable
of converting between a few binary formats I use internally, plus the
Commodore binary format (these are all a matter of headers), and patching
a Commodore BASIC stub (changing its SYS token to fpbasic's CALL token).
I did a lot of this by hand for the original Apple Crunch volumes.  I now
just run a Korn shell script on the source file, and get a .txt file ready
to load into ApplePC (which automagically saves the file too).  I can
prolly put this stuff up if needed.


Any chance you're willing to share that?  ;-)  I could use something
like that to speed up the AGS menu...
I suppose... it's some evil code though, I'll have to put it together in a zip sometime... ^O^ *yawn* it's late though and my brain isn't working right (as if it ever is!) 

-uso.