There are various C64 emulators available. Supported formats are varying, but they all support D64 format (.d64 file), which comprises the content of a c64 disk. After you have downloaded a C64 program from the internet you usually find that this program is treated by archivers and often by more than one archiver, likely not supported by the C64 emulator as input.
The basic idea behind TargetD64 to support as many archives / formats as possible and transform any input to D64 file(s) which are passed to the C64 emulator. Thus TargetD64 is a frontend providing suitable input for the C64 emulator (the backend) in the form of D64 files.
Well known examples of presented C64 content are .lnx.gz or .d64.zip format. Normally you are going through a process of dearchiving which needs user interaction (e.g. calling gunzip or launching up WinZip and so on). TargetD64 takes away all this work from the user. TargetD64 recognizes the archive format(s) and dearchives recursively. TargetD64 will finally produce D64 files which are passed to the C64 emulator.
Supported archive formats are zip, gz, lha, lnx, rar (< V2.9), [1-4]!, ark, d64, x64, t64, p00. If a file can not be matched to one of these formats it is treated as a raw C64 (PRG) file.
TargetD64 will process all horizontal and vertical combinations of the above stated archive formats. Vertical combinations are nested archives (e.g. .lnx in .gz). Horizontal combinations are an arbitrary sequence of archives (e.g. .lnx and .p00 file which are both contained in a .zip archive). The latter also applies to a sequence of archives you can give as command line arguments (in this case the sequence can also be achieved by filename wildcards). Neither nesting level nor sequence size are limited by TargetD64 itself (but they are by system resources).
All mentioned archives are builtins. So TargetD64 does not depend on any external applications (except the emulator of course).
TargetD64 is implemented in C++ with common sources for Win32 and Linux (distinction is achieved by compile switch). TargetD64, published under the terms of GPL, uses foreign GPL sources as mentioned in the distribution's README.
TargetD64 is fully "Drag & Drop" capable for Win32 and Linux's KDE. It is strongly recommended to configure "Drag & Drop" for the ease of use.
TargetD64 is pre configured for VICE (Linux) and WinVICE (Win32). It is fully adaptable to other emulators. This can be achieved by editing the profile file (preferably) or by command line options and environment variables.
A test suite is ready for download. The test suite is fully automated for Linux (result verification). For Win32 the result verification has to be done manually.
TargetD64 is right now available in source and binary distribution for:
TargetD64 is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
TargetD64 is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
See the GNU General Public License for more details.