itch.io

Welcome! Unfortunately, there's no command to give directions. I have included a downloadable map PDF, and someone on the CASA website made their own map (much more detailed than my included map) [search "CASA Kingdom of the Seven Stones" and likely it will come up]. That's fairly common of the era to hunt and try, not that it can't be frustrating at time, but thankfully maps are available. It was one of the sacrifices that had to be made to not include that feature due to the system size constraints.

Interesting. I looked at the firmware code, and I see that the the max rom capacity for the U2+ is 1MB, and they do support Magic Desk but the comment says that it supports a max of 16 x 16K chunks, which means 256K total. So they do support some banking but not the full range. Probably a very easy fix.

Nice collection! I love how shinny the boxes look making everything appear new still. Mine have dulled with age. Yes, fortunately the Kung Fu flash works well. I wasn't speaking on behalf of the TFW8Bit (since I'm not affiliated), but you could always reach out to them and ask if ever you wanted to order something. I can't say if they'd can make special cases or not but it doesn't hurt to ask... Nice to see the spectrum joined the group :-)

I don't work for TFW8Bit, but I do know international shipping is a bit of a nightmare. When packages are shipped to certain countries, the packages can be hit with not only tariffs and taxes but flat (+expensive) fees that are tacked on by the carrier and the receiving government. Those fees by the shipping company are to cover the crazy paperwork of local governments. DHL is one of the friendlier shipping companies in the sense their fees are more reasonable. When I say reasonable, I don't mean cheap, but DHL tends to deliver the package on time (important) and doesn't charge extra fees that makes a buyer think they are just using their "fees "to pay for their executives' next lavish vacations.

When sellers ship to countries that are not international friendly, the charges/fees can be so extreme by the local government that buyers will refuse the package and demand a refund. That leaves sellers in the position where they not only don't make a sale, but they eat the shipping costs of the package and the return too. Bottom line, sellers need to selectively pick to ship to specific countries, or they get royally fleeced (which will make sellers regret making a sale).

The other issues is that buyers often don't expect those fees (or think they are too high), so they might just think sellers are trying to make even more money, and refuse the package delivery. Depending on which country, buyers are often more or less aware of these fees, so banning some countries outright (sadly) is often done to prevent massive losses.

I can't speak to your specific country, nor do I know TFW8Bit specific policies, but I hope this helps explain the problem... I wish it were different...

Hi Gregor,

Thank you and thanks for asking!

I wish it could support it. I suspect there's two reasons. I looked over the U2+ specs and under "C64 cartridge emulation, with support for many CRT files" it lists "Custom Ocean / System3 carts (up to 512K)". This makes me wonder if there's not sufficient onboard RAM/flash to support larger cartridges (as this one is > 512K). The other issue concern is that this cartridge format is a Magic Desk 2 cartridge format, configured at 8Mb (1MB), and I do not explicitly see this in the list. It might be this particular data file format is not supported (yet). 

The same issue will present itself with any device that attempts to emulate cartridges, for example the Mini or the Maxi. They need to have sufficient space available to load the cartridge and bank in/out data "on-demand" and support the particular .crt file format for Magic Desk 2 at this capacity. Newer VICE versions supports this format, but it's not universal (yet + unfortunately).

For those wanting to understand the low level details, technically the game is a compiled 1MB binary (.bin) file with all the code, graphics, text and sound inside. I use the VICE cartridge converter to convert that binary file into a magic desk 2 .crt file. There's nothing special at all about this binary file otherwise. The binary file is 128 x 8K binary chunks merged (in-order) together into a single file then converted into a .crt files where meta data describing the contents of the cartridge format is added.

For the Magic Desk 2 format, a cartridge emulator (e.g. U2+, Maxi/Mini) needs to respond to requests when the game code sets a bank value at $DE00. The game code effectively does an LDA #bank STA $DE00 (or to translate to BASIC, a POKE 56832, <bank>). Then the cartridge emulator responds by presenting one of the 8K bank out of the 128 available as ROM memory at location $8000 for the C64 CPU. So the U2+ and Maxi/Mini need to add this tiny bit of logic and have the space in RAM/flash to be able to load this cartridge. Cartridge emulators already do this type of logic for other cartridges, so it would be very easy to support Magic Desk 2 if they have the RAM/flash space available to hold this size cartridge.

I hope this helps explain!