Depends on the program being loaded. Tape loaders used by c64 commercial games will autostart to make sure that you can't easily copy. Defeating the tapeloader with the autostart is how you cracked games distributed on tape. The iconic tape loader is Cyberload. A real beast to crack.
http://commodore.software/downloads/download/135-tape-turbo-...
Re:Give Yourself More Playtime (2015)
by abiogenesis on Monday March 30, 2020 @08:35PM
(#22733812)
True. I was talking about kernal LOAD and SAVE routines, which the OP seems to have used.
It could auto-run from tape. Take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UoF6_nXMSw
But from disk drive you needed to type LOAD"*",8,1 for it to load into something other than BASIC start address.
If you hit shift+run stop at the end of the command it'd load and run.
I think you could also autorun from disk as everything is memory mapped on the C64, but you couldn’t make it reliable nor portable.
See for instance this page which explores some of the possibilities (and problems)
The MERGE command would work if you were loading a normal BASIC program, but quickly you'd learn this didn't work with commercial games.
(Which largely loaded the system variables, and state, since the memory-map was fixed. If you tried to MERGE you'd load those values and your system would crash, reset, or otherwise hang.)
Sinclair Spectrum did, but that was also easily be circumventable by using the MERGE command instead of LOAD.