[rvdginste]

> There's something that seems very satisfying about loading software from tape, too.

Uhhh.. as someone who used to load software from tape on a CPC 464 ages ago, I can tell you that it was painfully slow. Nothing satisfying about it for me...

[ralferoo]

You might like my Amstrad CPC demo from 10 years ago called Breaking Baud.

It was a custom turbo loader for the CPC that had a co-operative multi-tasking thing going on, so it had a loader, music player, realtime data decompressor and some spare time left to do some other things.

I had plans to make the demo even better, but actually what got produced was quite pure because everything, literally EVERYTHING, is loaded directly into RAM and then decompressed in place (that's what the random white flashes are you might see at times - it's usually where a RLE marker was placed in RAM and shown by the display hardware before the background task to expand/copy the RLE section was executed).

As such, every step of the animations loaded could actually a full screen independent of the last, it's just most of the time it compresses super easily as the delta from what's already in the memory at that point is very small.

The live capture of the demo as it was presented live for the first time is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D62jpqZ6TG4 Someone else running it on real hardware (but sadly turned down the tape volume after a minute or so): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7HEK1B2oIc

This is a very early prototype that actually shows the speed of loading completely unrelated images, just relying on compression - some of the screens load 16KB in around 10 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfGcvWOaFFw (BUT BE WARNED IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE TO FLICKER)

[ralferoo]

I linked below in another comment a version of the last video captured on an emulator, so no flicker. Also, I set the correct palette for each picture, so it's a bit nicer to look at anyway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxX4fu6dAzo