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Winter Camp 2022 cartridge conversion

One of the last full releases for Commodore 64 from 1992. is finally converted to cartridge release for it’s 30th anniversary. And completed just in perfect X-mass time 🙂

Winter Camp is colorful and nice collection of mini games, but in original disk/tape version it was hindered by long loading times, linear level progression and not so representative first level – classical joystick wiggler. Combined with brutal difficulty of retro games, many players probably never even saw all levels.

Almost instantaneous loading times on cartridge allowed to make game much more interesting simply by opening access to all levels/minigames from start of the game. That way player can check all levels and minigames, and allow you to enjoy more with game as some of stages are really fun to play. It also helps you to figure out and train some of those minigame levels, as some of them require certain actions to be done. But that extra comes with small caveat 🙂 If you select any other level than first (by using keys 1-8 in main menu), that is considered as a stage training and hi-score and level progression are disabled. Only proper, full play through game started with fire button from main menu allows you a hi-score, level progression and game ending sequence.

Cartridge conversion used files from original G64 SPS disk images. Initially it was completed with crunched (exomized) files with file unpacking “on-the-fly” which allowed full ROM size to be under 128KB. But as non-compressed version loads noticeably faster, as ROM size is not anymore big issue with software defined cartridges like EasyFlash, BackBit, Kung Fu or Sidekick64, and as original idea was to create “console like experience” as much as possible, current version stayed as release target. On the fly unpacking and assets loading from cartridge ROM is possible, but it’s slower and remains usable for releases for which 512/1024KB ROM size is not enough (very large 5+ floppy games or compilations, for example).

As a small teaser, Summer Camp is 99% completed already, but it remains to complete remaining 1% 🙂 and do additional testing before releasing it.

There is plan also to publish native EasyFlash and Gmod2/3 release with hi-score saver, but that is having very low priority currently. Scene will probably do that faster than me anyway 🙂

Zip archive comes with following files:

WINTER_CAMP_MD.CRT – Useful for Kung Fu cartridge, VICE, FPGA/emulators supporting Magic Desk cart type.
WINTER_CAMP_OCEAN.CRT – Use this for EasyFlash programming, can be used in VICE/emulators also.
WINTER_CAMP_MD.BIN – Magic Desk/Marina64 256KB BIN file for EPROM programming.
WINTER_CAMP_OCEAN.BIN – Ocean 512KB BIN file for EPROM programming.

Bin files are provided in case you want to create your own cartridge. I successfully used this project for hardware (pozdrav Marko!), but it should be compatible with Marina64 cartridge also. Because of PCB/BOM ordering limitations I have few spare cartridges. If you would like to order fully completed and programmed cartridge as a small support of this learning project, please let me know in comments below. Enjoy! 🙂

UPDATE – 13.01.2023.

Small code optimization allowing a little faster boot time.

DOWNLOAD DOWNLOAD v1.01

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