How many times have you booted up your favorite game, only to find that your joystick is plugged into the wrong port? Playing games is fun on the C-64, but switching joystick ports isn't. Not only is moving the joystick annoying, it's also hazardous. Unless you turn your computer off before unplugging the joystick, a static charge from your fingertips could hit the connectors and blow a chip!
Uniport 64 is a machine language utility that solves this problem with most public domain and type-in games. To use it, just put your joystick in port 2, run Uniport and then run your game program, even if it's written for port 1. Unfortunately, many commercial games check for foreign code in memory as part of piracy protection, so Uniport won't work with them.
Uniport also sets up a handy reset key to save wear on the computer's on/off switch. When you're finished playing one game, simply tap control/restore to reset the system and load a new game. Uniport will remain active until you turn off the computer.
Programs that normally use joystick port 1 run slightly faster with Uniport. This is because port 1 activity is treated by the operating system as keypresses, which take more time to decode than port 2 activity. Uniport corrects this problem by processing all input through port 2.
Uniport directly modifies the operating system and resides safely out of the way under ROM. Only 13 bytes of RAM are used (locations 53235-53247), so Uniport will rarely be overwritten by your game. Occasionally a game will deactivate Uniport during initialization, and the keyboard will freeze. A simple tap on the restore key will reactivate the utility.
Once you've tried Uniport's convenient features, you'll use it with all of your favorite RUN games.
