C64 Emulation - A quicker way to load disks and tape?

[mothergoose729]

Hi there, I am starting to mess around with the commodore 64 using VICE. My biggest complaint is that most of my games are all floppy drive images, or worse yet, tape images, and they take something like 1000 years to load. I know that is how it was on the real c64... and yay for accuracy and authenticity and all that. I live in the fast pace "it's 2017 and I need it yesterday world", so I was wondering if there are settings in VICE, or another emulator that can load tape and disk drives much faster. Maybe instantly. It seems like something somebody should have done.

Oh and before you mention it, I know that VICE already speeds it up quite a bit. I want it faster than even that.

Thanks :)

Edited April 21, 2017 by mothergoose729

[roy1975]

The only thing I'm aware of is the warp feature (alt-w), which I usually switch on after loading and then switch off after I hit the title screen. Not instantaneous but it certainly cuts down on the load times quite a bit.

[Zombeaver]

You should try out CCS64. It has an awesome "Maximum 1541 Speed" feature that automatically detects when a game is loading data and speeds up the emulation speed to something like 1000% and when it's done loading it drops it back down to normal. It's basically a warp feature that turns on and off automatically. I'm a C64 nut and CCS64 is my go-to emulator. The feature is in the "Special" options section. You'll probably want to set it to "On - Quiet" which is the same thing as "On" except that "On" increases the speed and shows a message box indicating that it's doing it and "On - Quiet" does it without showing the box - it just does it.

It should be noted that it only works for disk formats though. You can still manually engage warp, but Maximum 1541 Speed only kicks in for disk formats. The vast majority of stuff that you'd (probably) want on C64 is available in a disk image format though.

[mothergoose729]

2 hours ago, roy1975 said:

The only thing I'm aware of is the warp feature (alt-w), which I usually switch on after loading and then switch off after I hit the title screen. Not instantaneous but it certainly cuts down on the load times quite a bit.

Yeah warp speed isn't bad thing. Hitting alt w isn't that hard I suspose :p. Thanks. 

 

2 hours ago, Zombeaver said:

You should try out CCS64. It has an awesome "Maximum 1541 Speed" feature that automatically detects when a game is loading data and speeds up the emulation speed to something like 1000% and when it's done loading it drops it back down to normal. It's basically a warp feature that turns on and off automatically. I'm a C64 nut and CCS64 is my go-to emulator. The feature is in the "Special" options section. You'll probably want to set it to "On - Quiet" which is the same thing as "On" except that "On" increases the speed and shows a message box indicating that it's doing it and "On - Quiet" does it without showing the box - it just does it.

It should be noted that it only works for disk formats though. You can still manually engage warp, but Maximum 1541 Speed only kicks in for disk formats. The vast majority of stuff that you'd (probably) want on C64 is available in a disk image format though.

Totally going to try that. Most of my stuff is in disc format so this will help a lot.

 

I'll have to look and see if some of my tape games are abondonware, and also available in disk format. Some of them I have only been able to find in tape. 

 

It would be great if there was a utility to convert tape or disk to cart, at the file level. None of my games are cart :(. 

Edited April 21, 2017 by mothergoose729