Batch 20 : Turbo Loaders

Where would we have been, without Turbo Loaders on games ? Slightly more bored or a greater reason to sleep unlike Cats who seem to do that most of their lives ? Well, anything to speed up the time in waiting for your favourite game to load, isn't that bad ? Three questions in the first paragraph is asking for trouble, but despite the wonder of Turbo Loaders, there is also the terror of them failing at the same time ...

Just two for you this time, in between my rant about Turbo Loaders ...

Mastertronic Added Dimension ::
Storm Bringer

Ricochet ::
Dragon Skulle

I have some favourite Turbo Loaders and also some most hated ones, more so for their total failure in my experience on certain C2N Tape Decks. Don't get me wrong, Commodore's ROM Loader is fine on smaller games and programs, but we must praise Turbo Loaders !

Favourite [ 3 ] ::

1 : Burner ( Mastertronic )
2 : Novaload ( US Gold and Ocean )
3 : Bleepload ( Firebird )

Worst [ 3 ] ::

1 : Cyberload ( System 3 ) - Why ? : Some Backup Cartridges needed to be removed in order to play the game.
2 : Wildsave ( Thalamus ) - Why ? : The Loader is way too sensitive on certain C2N Tape Decks. I hated those thin multi-coloured lines when the loading failed !
3 : Virgin Loader ( Virgin ) - Why ? : Multi-coloured lines of pure hatred on load errors !

One of the two games from this batch, Dragon Skulle, has quite a long loading time. Counter 149, that's about 5-6 mins or maybe a bit more. Quite a chunky wait after a loading screen ! Some of Mastertronic's Ricochet releases have Invade-a-load and when the game has loaded you can see the decrunching process happen, as characters change colour and go slightly corrupt. Does this mean the original game was frozen and then restarted with a JSR e.g. ( $4000 ) ?

Anyway, the current collected total so far is ... 180 !