Well, the last two visits were a tale of two downloaders. For disc storage I enabled Plus 1 and Plus 3, and I used the ACP E00 DFS.
The first visit made use of the Jafa Mode 7 Simulator and the built-in terminal emulator. This one was actually faster at downloading file content, despite the apparently fixed 1200/75 baud transfer rates, but it got to the end of the download and produced an error. I don't know what the error actually was, but since I had remembered to make Elkulator write-enable the disc and most of the file was saved, it wasn't that particular, recurring mistake.
So, the second visit made use of Commstar instead. I initiated the download but found it to be rather slower. Commstar gives the choice of saving to disc or to the buffer, but the file was going to exceed the buffer space, so it went straight to disc. I think that despite choosing faster 2400/2400 baud transfer rates, Commstar must be writing each byte out at a time to the file, or otherwise doing something that impacts performance. Anyway, this transfer eventually went to completion. I dread to think of what the phone bill would have been back in the day.
Anyway, the downloaded program was Acornsoft's Invaders running in mode 7. A standard Electron with the Mode 7 Simulator enabled cannot run this because the ROM uses mode 2, and so there is not enough memory. However, upgrading the emulated Electron with a Master RAM Board does allow the game to run. The metadata for the file wasn't set, but...
...did the trick.
However, even with the Master RAM Board, it is pretty slow. All that conversion of Teletext characters to bitmaps involves quite some overhead. But the fact that this game runs shows how impressive and comprehensive Jafa's emulation is. And it isn't surprising that the combination of Master RAM Board, serial cartridge and Mode 7 Simulator was somewhat in demand, at least from Jafa's perspective, back in the day.
Thanks once again to Brian for offering the experience of old-school software downloading!
The first visit made use of the Jafa Mode 7 Simulator and the built-in terminal emulator. This one was actually faster at downloading file content, despite the apparently fixed 1200/75 baud transfer rates, but it got to the end of the download and produced an error. I don't know what the error actually was, but since I had remembered to make Elkulator write-enable the disc and most of the file was saved, it wasn't that particular, recurring mistake.
So, the second visit made use of Commstar instead. I initiated the download but found it to be rather slower. Commstar gives the choice of saving to disc or to the buffer, but the file was going to exceed the buffer space, so it went straight to disc. I think that despite choosing faster 2400/2400 baud transfer rates, Commstar must be writing each byte out at a time to the file, or otherwise doing something that impacts performance. Anyway, this transfer eventually went to completion. I dread to think of what the phone bill would have been back in the day.
Anyway, the downloaded program was Acornsoft's Invaders running in mode 7. A standard Electron with the Mode 7 Simulator enabled cannot run this because the ROM uses mode 2, and so there is not enough memory. However, upgrading the emulated Electron with a Master RAM Board does allow the game to run. The metadata for the file wasn't set, but...
Code:
CHAIN "INVADERS"However, even with the Master RAM Board, it is pretty slow. All that conversion of Teletext characters to bitmaps involves quite some overhead. But the fact that this game runs shows how impressive and comprehensive Jafa's emulation is. And it isn't surprising that the combination of Master RAM Board, serial cartridge and Mode 7 Simulator was somewhat in demand, at least from Jafa's perspective, back in the day.
Thanks once again to Brian for offering the experience of old-school software downloading!
Statistics: Posted by paulb — Fri May 24, 2024 11:35 pm