About vsfReanimator

vsfReanimator converts a VICE snapshot (.vsf) to a .prg file that can be started on the DTV. Since it uses VICE’s internal snapshot data as input, it can even restore SID registers (which is impossible for C64 freezers since SID registers can’t be read). Since the generated .prg files are bigger than 64k they cannot be loaded from floppy using standard LOAD routines. See here for details.

Status

For current code see SVN. If you find any program that does not unfreeze properly please contact me.

Webfrontend

There is a webfrontend for converting .vsfs. Just upload the .vsf and get the .prg back.

A special feature is that arbitrary data can be included in the .prg to go into upper mem ($010000 and up). This can be used for including file system images (see Fixing Games for the DTV Example: Armalyte for an example).

dtvDexomizer decompressor

A DTV version of an Exomizer decruncher that can handle .prgs larger than 202 blocks (such as generated by vsfReanimator) can be found in SVN. It uses the DTV2’s skip+burst mode and decompresses a lot faster than standard “exomizer sfx” that is not DTV aware and thus does not enable skip+burst. It is a bit less optimized than exomizer sfx concerning space efficiency though.

Status

For current code see SVN.

To run it, you need to…

• compile segcrunch.c using gcc (helper by tlr - breaks the file to compress in segments and calls exomizer on these chunks)
• compile exodecrunch.asm to decompressor.prg using acme (?) (will be read by dtvDexomizer.php)
• run php dtvDexomizer.php input.prg > result.prg - for other parameters see the PHP file.

Another Exomizer decompressor with better performance is included in the TRSI demo kernal. Anyone to adapt this for dtvDexomizer?

Compressor benchmarks

Size

mayhem-dtv.prg
uncompressed:          207K
DTV Flash compressed:  131K
Exomizer, 16k chunks:  104K
Exomizer, 16k offset:  103K
GZip:                  101K
BZip2:                 101K
Exomizer, 32k chunks:  101K (= dtvDexomizer segcrunch)
Exomizer, 48k chunks:  100K
Exomizer, 32k offset:   96K
Exomizer, 48k offset:   94K
Exomizer, continuous:   92K

Speed

62K test file, compressed to 32K
Exomizer SFX:            9,6sec (= 6,4K/sec)
Exomizer SFX, s+b        4,3sec (= 14,4K/sec)

Mayhem-dtv.prg (207K uncompressed)
dtvDexomizer segcrunch  14,3sec (= 14,5K/sec)
DTV Flash load:          9,8sec (= 21,1K/sec)
DTV Flash load, s+b:     5,9sec (= 35,1K/sec)