A fast loader is a replacement for a computer’s own loading routine. The routines in ROM were written to load from any cassette deck, any tape and any disk, and they paid for that reliability in time. A fast loader takes the safety margins back. It loads from the same tape or the same drive, but asks more of them and gets the program in faster.
By the middle of the 1980s the loader had become a product in its own right. Commodore Computing International gave it a line of its own in its review boxes from September 1984, next to the scores for sound and playability (“Fast Loader: Turbo”, “Fast Loader: None”). Publishers used their loaders as copy protection, players argued about them in the letters pages, and some loaders gave you a game to play while the real one arrived.
What the stock routines were doing
Each machine’s own loader shows where the time went.
Commodore 64, tape. Harrie De Ceukelaire explained the C64’s tape format in COMPUTE! in February 1985. It records every bit as square waves of three different lengths, and “when you save a program on tape, the computer automatically records it twice, end to end”, so that errors in the first copy can be repaired from the second. The result, he wrote, was that “many Commodore tape users never see a ?LOAD ERROR message”, at the price of “long waits for programs to load”. “Since you can’t make the tape run faster,” De Ceukelaire wrote, “the only alternative is to change the recording format—cut back on Commodore’s fail-safe mechanisms.” His own TurboTape used one pulse per bit, a long one for 1 and a short one for 0, and recorded the program once.
ZX Spectrum, tape. The Spectrum’s ROM writes a 0 bit as two pulses of 855 T-states each (a T-state is one tick of the processor’s 3.5 MHz clock), and a 1 bit as two pulses twice as long. That works out at about 2,000 bits a second for 0s and 1,000 for 1s, so the speed depends on the data. Every block also starts with a steady leader tone, about five seconds before a header and two before the program itself. The border stripes that every Spectrum owner remembers come from the same routine: red and cyan while the leader plays, blue and yellow once data arrives, changing colour at every edge of the signal.
BBC Micro and Amstrad CPC, tape. Both machines let the user choose. The BBC Micro loads at 1200 baud by default, and *TAPE3 drops it to 300. The Amstrad’s cassette manager can work anywhere from 700 to 2500 baud; its firmware manual names 1000 baud as the default and 2000 as the common faster setting, and advises users “to stick to them”.
Commodore 64, disk. Commodore’s 1541 drive transferred 400 bytes a second. The slow part was the serial cable to the computer, not the disk, and the fix involved sending new code into the drive’s own processor. That story has its own entry, Disk Fastloaders.
How fast loaders win the time back
On tape the method is the one De Ceukelaire described: fewer, shorter pulses for each bit, and one copy instead of two. The loader must then time each pulse precisely, which on the C64 meant using a CIA timer, and the shorter pulses leave less room for a worn tape or a badly aligned head. The details, including how a turbo loader boots itself from a normal tape file, are in How a Cassette Becomes a Game.
Commercial tape loaders usually sped up more than the pulses. They added their own checks, graphics and music, and some listened for signs that the tape was a copy: Speedlock, below, reset the machine if it heard too much noise. A fast loader and a copy protection scheme were often the same piece of code.
On disk, the loader has to run at both ends of the cable. Cartridges such as Epyx’s Fast Load, The Final Cartridge and Datel’s Action Replay, and replacement ROMs such as JiffyDOS, did this for any program. The Final Cartridge’s December 1985 advertising promised a “DISK TURBO - 6 times faster” and a “TAPE TURBO - 10 times faster”. Disk Fastloaders compares the claims with the measurements.
Loaders with names
Novaload
On the C64, Novagen’s Novaload was the loader people talked about. Zzap!64 called it “that hugely popular fast-loader” in July 1985, and in March 1986 a CRASH reader wished that Spectrum publishers would standardise on one loader “as NOVALOAD is on the Commodore 64”. Retro Gamer later remembered it for its “screeching noises”. Pavloda, another C64 tape loader, “would check for errors and ask you to rewind and try again” rather than simply failing.
Speedlock
On the Spectrum, the name was Speedlock. David Aubrey Jones told CRASH in 1987 how it began: “I’d been getting more and more frustrated because of the time the standard one took – and I thought I could do a lot better. At the same time David Looker had been developing another system, so we put our two ideas together and came up with Speedlock.” It took about a year to find a customer. Ocean was the first, on Daley Thompson’s Decathlon in 1984.
Speedlock was as much a lock as a loader, and the letters pages argued about it for months. In June 1985 CRASH’s letter of the month, from Paul Rhodes, reported that it was used by “Ultimate, Ocean and many others”, that it reset the Spectrum if it heard too much “noise” on the tape, as a poor copy would produce, and that it “adds insult to injury by waiting until the program has finished loading before it crashes”. He still thought it “probably the best protected loader on the market”, while adding that it was “easy to break into any Speedlocked program in a couple of hours once a technique has been worked out”.
Bleepload
Firebird’s Bleepload shows the other side of the arrangement. A protected loader was also a barrier to cheats, so the hacking pages of Your Sinclair in 1988 printed general-purpose “Bleepload hacker” programs. Readers typed one in, added the POKEs for a particular Firebird game, and loaded the original tape through it to get infinite lives. See POKE Culture.
Something to do while you wait
A faster load was still a wait, and loaders filled it. The Spectrum ROM’s own stripes at least showed that something was arriving; commercial loaders added pictures, music and counters. Some went further. Mastertronic’s Invade-a-Load was a Space Invaders clone that ran, to Rob Hubbard’s music from One Man and His Droid, while the main game loaded. Zzap!64‘s reviewer of 3-D Pinball in March 1991 “enjoyed playing the Invade-a-load more than the game itself”. Retro Gamer lists others: Players’ Software’s Painter, and the “Mix-e-load” on the C64 version of Delta, which let the player remix a Rob Hubbard tune during the load.
Sources
- Harrie De Ceukelaire, “How TurboTape Works”, COMPUTE!, issue 57, February 1985, from p. 112: the C64 tape format and TurboTape.
- Ian Logan and Frank O’Hara, The Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly (Melbourne House, 1983): the SA-BYTES and LD-BYTES routines, pulse timings, leaders and border colours; the 3.5 MHz clock.
- Andrew C. Bray, Adrian C. Dickens and Mark A. Holmes, The Advanced User Guide for the BBC Microcomputer (Cambridge Microcomputer Centre, 1983), section 2.19:
*TAPEand the 300 and 1200 baud rates. - Bruce Godden, CPC464 Firmware (Locomotive Software and Amstrad, SOFT 158, 1984): the cassette manager’s speeds.
- Commodore, 1540/1541 Disk Drive Service Manual (preliminary, January 1985), p. 1: 400 bytes a second.
- Commodore Computing International, vol. 3 no. 3, September 1984: the “Fast Loader:” line in review boxes.
- Zzap!64, issue 3, July 1985: Novagen and Novaload.
- CRASH, issue 17, June 1985, p. 58: Paul Rhodes on Speedlock.
- CRASH, issue 26, March 1986, p. 45: reader’s letter on Speedlock and Novaload.
- Richard Eddy, profile of David Aubrey Jones, CRASH, issue 44, September 1987: the origin of Speedlock and its first use.
- Your Sinclair, issues 33-36, September to December 1988: Bleepload hackers in the hacking pages.
- H & P Computers, The Final Cartridge advertisement, Your Commodore, December 1985.
- Zzap!64, issue 71, March 1991: 3-D Pinball review.
- Retro Gamer, issue 20, pp. 65-66: loaders, loading games and Mix-e-Load.