Rerip: Cosmic Cruiser - Imagine

[sixxie]

Includes title screens and instructions.

However. (Warning: rambley text follows...)

Looks like Imagine (or "Creative Technology Group Ltd.") were a bit sneaky with their loader - not very sneaky, probably just the best they could come up with at the time.

There are three parts to the load: loader, first title screen, then second title screen + game code. Each part actually has a filename block and will load separately, but the loader deliberately delays long enough to skip past this block, and will IO error if it actually reads one. The only copying I can see this impeding is manual loading and saving of the parts where you don't get the inter-part gap just right, so I'm not sure what the point was...

This means XRoar's tape rewriting will make an incorrect dump (though one that will actually load!), as it only dumps stuff that the tape routines actually read in, so it misses out the filename blocks. The game loads, but it's not really an "archival" copy (and any published cheat methods that just depend on you SKIPFing won't work).

So this one has been dumped by SKIPFing over each part, and then the header trimmed in the .cas file to be just the right length. It loads into a real Dragon, if converted to an audio file, but most old versions of XRoar insert delays after motor on to try and account for truncated headers, etc., so they actually fail with this copy. There's a new snapshot here with better tape code, but I'm still reasoning what good defaults would be, given most people won't want to be messing with tape options just to load particular images...

Edit: oh yes, meant to point out: this probably applies to Pedro too, but I never did find my copy of that, so can't readily check.

[Alastair]

Interesting, that may explain my experience with "Leggit" - it would load when using one tape recorder, but proved more troublesome with my otherwise non-problematic regular recorder.

[sixxie]

Leggit has a small BASIC program first that you have to manually RUN, which then loads the MC code. I can see it being a problem if you have no motor control - could easily overrun the beginning of the MC portion before you've typed RUN.