The basic idea behind TargetD64 is to shift as much processing as possible from the user to the computer before a particular program (or a group of programs) is executed by an emulator. After you have downloaded a program from the internet you usually find that this program is treated by archivers and often by more than one archiver. Well known examples should be the .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 archives which are passed to an emulator.

Supported archive formats are zip, gz, lha, lnx, ark, [1-4]!, 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 at the credits page.

TargetD64, basically a command line tool, 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 CCS64 V1.09 DOS (Win32). It is fully adaptable to other emulators by a profile (INI-file).

With the Win32 binary distribution of TargetD64 there come configurations for CCS64 V2.0 beta DOS/Win32, C64S V2.52 and WinVICE 2.2.

A test suite is ready for download (there you can see what TargetD64 can do for you and compare it to other tools). 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:

Linux on i386-compatible processor, glibc-2.11.2 based
Win XP (mind that other versions of Win are not tested anymore but supposed to work)

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.