Ever since the "7 days of D-Bug" week last December, as you can notice I updated my loader code a bit. The most striking feature, as you all see is that it's a bit more flashy compared to the old code.

But I never commented on a feature of it because... I... err... lack of time... something like that.

The neccesity for coding it was to send After the War for testing on my MSTE. It has (had) only a 720k floppy disk. When I assembled After the War to a single file, its file size was way over 1 meg. So, how do I transfer that easily? And, say I discover a bug in the code. Do I have to split & copy 1mb of data again and again? Heck no! That's why I separated the loader from the datafile. So the big file was intact and I only had to copy the loader over. But that didn't solve the fact that I had to transfer the damn file over (I must add here that the MSTE has (had) no hard drive!). So I had to modify my loader code to handle split data files.

Anyway, here's how it works: whenever I fix a large title, I release a zip file with 1 prg and 1 datafile in it. For example, this month's fix pack contains Gold of the Aztecs. "gota.zip" contains "gota.prg" and "gota1.ggn". You can split the data file in up to 9 files following the convention "gota1.ggn", "gota2.ggn" etc. The files can be any size desired, as long as the collective size of them equals the original. Then you can copy the files to disks and then to your Ataris' hard drives, or if you don't have them you can still play the game from floppy, as you'll be asked for each file in turn. (heck, you can even run the game from single sided floppies if it fits in 9 files ).

So, how do you split this file? Well, there are +oo utilities on PC that can do that: Total Commander (the one I use daily), http://www.freebyte.com/hjsplit/ etc. Be careful not to confuse the original file with the split files! Better rename the big file to something else before doing the split.

So, basically that's it. Hope it's of any use!