Vice State Loader

Vic20-Ian · Post by **Vic20-Ian** » Mon Mar 09, 2009 4:10 pm

Strange noodling while preparing to meet up with arch Swedish coder tomorrow evening in Vasteras.

How about a loader programme that could read VICE snapshot files.

e.g. Read Snapshot header containing states into tape buffer, load bulk of memory back into place , poke all the states back into place and jump to execution pointer?

Probably not possible and more likely not even needed just wondered if it could be done.

Pedro Lambrini · Post by **Pedro Lambrini** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 2:54 am

It would be handy for saving high scores. That always drove me crazy about Vic games. Why couldn't they be coded to allow you to insert a blank tape or something and save you scores to that, why?!

Obviously, as an adult I'm a little more philosophical about this situation but Ians suggestion could be good if it's possible.

Vic20-Ian · Post by **Vic20-Ian** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 11:34 am

Building on that could we have a Vic Action Replay cartridge to save and restore the vic state to disk or better uIEC?

The Action Replay type cart should save and restore Vice format files.

Play on the vic at home, action replay store to uIEC, take the SD with you and carry on on Vice on the laptop.

tlr · Post by **tlr** » Sat Mar 28, 2009 4:40 am

Something like this has been done by 1570 for the C64DTV emulation in vice.
It is a PC program that converts a snapshot file into an executable file for the DTV.
here: VSFReanimator

The same could be done for the vic20 emulation.

Vic20-Ian · Post by **Vic20-Ian** » Sun Mar 29, 2009 4:30 pm

Thanks TLR. Nice to know crazy ideas are not that crazy sometimes.

It could basically give us the ability to high score save or pause and continue anything on the Vic.

Imagine, plug a cart in the vic with SD card support, when you hit reset the Vic state is dumped to SD card in Vice snapshot format. Load it back up in Vice or reset the vic and reload from the SD at a later time.

The cart could be simpler if it was used in conjunction with uIEC.

tlr · Post by **tlr** » Mon Mar 30, 2009 11:31 am

Vic20-Ian wrote:Imagine, plug a cart in the vic with SD card support, when you hit reset the Vic state is dumped to SD card in Vice snapshot format. Load it back up in Vice or reset the vic and reload from the SD at a later time.

This is basically what a freezer does for the c64.
Implementing it for the vic-20 is non-trivial because of architectural differences.

Vic20-Ian · Post by **Vic20-Ian** » Sun Apr 05, 2009 2:12 pm

Yes basically it is a freezer cart idea but I would like to extend it so that the frozen image could be used with Vice away from home on a laptop and then a vice snapshot with new highscores could be put on SD card and loaded back to the real Vic20