Chariot Race unexpanded from tape. Why does it require 8K expansion from disk?

[8bitDenial]

I bought Chariot Race back in the day and remember it working on an unexpanded Vic20.

(Was one of my favourites, along with Shadowfax).

As I’m not a big “media” collector (I just don’t have the room these days), I use a Tapuino to play .tap files into my Commodes (Sic), when I want to kick it oldskool. (yuck!)

I found a .tap file of Chariot Race which works on the unexpanded Vic, but can only locate .d64 files which require the 8K expansion.

Did converting this game to load from disk force the use of a RAM expander? There are MANY other unexpanded games which run from disk…

[Mike]

Did converting this game to load from disk force the use of a RAM expander?

Those are just bad "cracks" - not that the game actually had a copy protection of any noteworthiness.

However, bringing all the data into place from disk instead of tape might require some extra memory, because tape loads do not only transfer the actual payload into BASIC memory but the tape buffer is also filled as side effect (and might contain relevant data other than just the filename and start/end addresses). Finding that little bit extra space within the unexpanded VIC-20 RAM is difficult, but doable in 99%+ of the time.

You find more details about this here: How to convert Tap files to D64?