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Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

I also remember that there existed cool loaders that were able to paint the image in arbitrary order. It was pretty impressive because it required doing calculations in the tight loop which calculated the delay between slopes of the signal which came from tape.

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Below is a link to one I did. It loads in various patters, including writing, and from what I remember was spread out over the time it took to load the game so there was always something going on.

It wasn't the best game around, hopefully the loader made up for that!!

https://youtu.be/8e_IkqfMeD4?t=290

(Fighting Warrior by Melbourne House / Studio B)

Nice one! I wonder how much work would it take nowadays to set up emulation capable of executing these loaders on an emulated tape :)

I suspect it could be pretty tough as it relies on very tight CPU timing. I'm sure it's doable though.

I remember a loader where you could play a game of Mastermind while the game was loading. Magic. Blew my mind, it's the kind of thing that wasn't supposed to be possible, yet it was...

There is something like a 171 clock cycle delay in the regular tape loaded routine between looking for edge transitions in the audio signal. You just break your program up into pieces that fits into that. I did one that did a countdown timer and broke it into exactly the loop delay but I suspect the tape loading would be tolerant to a little more inexactness.

There were games where you could play tic tac toe during loading.

Now that's impressive.

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