But anything more complex is almost impossible.

With cassette it is a whole different story... Cassette interface is standard on every MSX,

so you can do pretty much anything you like to, but you have to be very carefull to get the

timing right. Unfortunately I don't know any good examples for MSX, but for example Ghost

busters on C64 allowed you to play Space Inviders during loading of the actual game. There

is no reason why this could not be done on MSX as well.

I think the reason, why MSX did not have this kind of loaders was, that routines on MSX BIOS

were too good and there was no need to rewrite them unlike in C64, where the original

cassette routines sucked a big time! (They were horribly slow and even very unreliable)

Here is a simple example, how to use cassettes in new way! This example is not a loader, but

it should be otherways funny

- Make following kind of loader routine on BASIC:

10 A$="F3160701A27F210000DBAAA05F3E0ED3A0ED78A0B3D3AA2B7CB520F51520F2C9"
20 FOR I=0 TO &H1F:POKE&HC000+I,VAL("&H"+MID$(A$,I*2+1,2)):NEXT
30 DEFUSR=&HC000
40 MOTOR ON:A=USR(0):MOTOR OFF
50 BLOAD"CAS:NEXT",R

- Now save this routine to cassette...

- Take cassette out and place it to your music recorder

- Adjust microphone input very much louder, than you normally do

- Press record and say something like "Now loading XYZ made by XXX... Please wait"

- Stop recorder and place your cassette back to MSX cassette drive.

- Now record the actual game (In this example "NEXT" )

When you load the game, you should hear the explanation (about 10sec) before the game loads. I didn't test this (as I use tR ), so there might be some errors in the code, but I hope you got the idea...

Only problem after makeing your loader is, how to copy it to your friends, and how in earth you get anyone to load a game from cassette in 2004 :-9

>how in earth you get anyone to load a game from cassette in 2004

Not a problem - but substitute casette with CD or PC soundcard output, and use a fast loader, like WAVeR or microWAVer

P.S. Using turbo loaders could make concurrent music playing hard to impossible...
(because when you load more data in the same timeframe you have less time for doing other things)

Oops, I didn't post start of my message, so here it comes:


Yes, it is possible to make a musical loader... NOP has actually even made a program, that played a full screen movie with sounds during loading it from disk. See: ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/msx/demos/NOP/traxplayer-songs/ and ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/msx/demos/NOP/realmotion/

The problem is anyway, that you can not make diskloader so, that it would be done according to MSX standard. This means, that the loader will only work on some MSX models.

If you play by the rules, the options are as told in previous posts... If you want just something, you can make Zoids kind of effect even with BASIC like this:

10 SOUND 0,255:SOUND1,255
20 SOUND 12,15:SOUND13,14
30 SOUND 8,16

But anything more complex is almost impossible.
.
.
.

I just noticed, that I can test the cassette code on OpenMSX... Ofcource there was one byte missing. *sigh* Here is updated version...

10 A$="F3160701A27F210000DBAAA0045F3E0ED3A0ED78A0B3D3AA2B7CB520F51520F2C9"
20 FOR I=0 TO &H20:POKE&HC000+I,VAL("&H"+MID$(A$,I*2+1,2)):NEXT
30 DEFUSR=&HC000
40 MOTOR ON:A=USR(0):MOTOR OFF
50 BLOAD"CAS:NEXT",R

Quote:

Many years ago I bought a pirate cassette with the game "Samantha Fox SP" and during loading I heard a sound... It was not a song played by the PSG but more or less a noise... Could it be possible?

you keep wondering the wonder of samantha fox... but do as I said earlier, put bug-byte´s "Rally X" to your cassette recorder and start loading it !!! If the sammy fox and zoids loading noise get your hair straight, I really wonder what happens to you all when you hear MSX actually PLAYING the tape loading whistle thru the television speaker!!! Damn on you, get cassette recorder, any will do and "rally x" or "dig dug" or "warp warp" or "elite" cassette versions from ebay or some other place and put them to that damned cassette recorder, put on wires between msx and recorder, put your msx to teevee, put your television ON and press your MSX power on, type BLOAD"CAS:",R press play on tape and start waiting... after a while screen is filled with colour bars and that LOVING LOADING NOISE comes alive !!!!!!!

get those cassette games from somewhere or ask someone to lend them to you and T R Y these games!!!

You disk drive owners don´t understand what I mean if you don´t even try !!!