Your dream Amiga?

[Stephen Coates]

True, but what about on games when you are just given a blank screen while the game is loading?

[Harrison]

Remember though that most of us came from the 8-bit era and were used to waiting for games to load from cassette! Those could take 8 minutes! And what did we have to watch while that was happening? A loading screen if we were lucky. Compared to that the Amiga floppy disks loaded games in next to no time so relatively speaking waiting for a game to load on the Amiga wasn't a hardship compared to before.

[Demon Cleaner]

When I first got my C64, it came with cassette, as the floppy drive was still too expensive, at that time about 375€. But on cassette you had only very few games that were actually good, the rest was crappy. Of course I mean the copied cassettes, you couldn't copy games which came in several parts, as the cassette reader did only read one track, then you could run it, but it did not load the next part, if you didn't have the right loaders, so it was hard to get a "better", let's say bigger game on cassette.

I already mentioned that I never bought games, that wasn't not only because of my limited budget, but we had no shops here in Luxembourg, and I mean NO. We had to drive to Trier, which was the nearest bigger village from my hometown, but we only went once a year.

So one day I got hold of the original Summer Games from a friend. And then you can say "the waiting is the hardest part". When you practiced an event, you had to re/wind your cassette to a certain count (the 1530 dataset had a counter, as most cassette players at that time), then press play and wait for the event to practice. But if you wanted to play the whole events in competition mode, you pressed play, waited 5 minutes, played one event for 30 seconds, then again wait 5 minutes for the next one to load. And you can image that certain events are quite fiddly to play, and if you don't know exactly how they work, you play max 30 seconds and it's over.

It was pure satisfaction when a game was loaded. Of course later on we had some Turbo Tape loaders, which speeded the whole thing up a bit.

And I still remember my cassettes:

000-034 - Soccer 64
035-078 - Jumpman Jr
079-104 - Jungle Hunt

and so on. We had to write the counter position down for later loading the game, we were really crazy at the time, that was pure dedication to gaming

[Harrison]

That is really mad

I never had to do anything like that on the CPC, but then it did load much faster from cassette than the "superior" C64!

[Stephen Coates]

I have a few games on cassette for the BBC. I have played Tetris alot recently on it and that usually takes a good few minutes to load. To keep you occupied while loading cassette games though you do have to keep hoping that the volume control is set correctly, and that the tape is still working properly (My copy of tetris is fine though because despite it being 20 years old, was only remove from it's original packaging a couple of months ago).

[Harrison]

Have you considered getting a 5 1/4" disk drive for your BBC Steve? Much easier to use than tapes. Thinking about it I never did use or even see a tape drive for any of the BBC Micros I used over the years, and there were quite a few. Was there much software released on tape for the system compared to on disk?

[Submeg]

When I first got my C64, it came with cassette, as the floppy drive was still too expensive, at that time about 375€. But on cassette you had only very few games that were actually good, the rest was crappy. Of course I mean the copied cassettes, you couldn't copy games which came in several parts, as the cassette reader did only read one track, then you could run it, but it did not load the next part, if you didn't have the right loaders, so it was hard to get a "better", let's say bigger game on cassette.

I already mentioned that I never bought games, that wasn't not only because of my limited budget, but we had no shops here in Luxembourg, and I mean NO. We had to drive to Trier, which was the nearest bigger village from my hometown, but we only went once a year.

So one day I got hold of the original Summer Games from a friend. And then you can say "the waiting is the hardest part". When you practiced an event, you had to re/wind your cassette to a certain count (the 1530 dataset had a counter, as most cassette players at that time), then press play and wait for the event to practice. But if you wanted to play the whole events in competition mode, you pressed play, waited 5 minutes, played one event for 30 seconds, then again wait 5 minutes for the next one to load. And you can image that certain events are quite fiddly to play, and if you don't know exactly how they work, you play max 30 seconds and it's over.

It was pure satisfaction when a game was loaded. Of course later on we had some Turbo Tape loaders, which speeded the whole thing up a bit.

And I still remember my cassettes:

000-034 - Soccer 64
035-078 - Jumpman Jr
079-104 - Jungle Hunt

and so on. We had to write the counter position down for later loading the game, we were really crazy at the time, that was pure dedication to gaming

hats off to you DC. That is pure dedication!

[Stephen Coates]

Have you considered getting a 5 1/4" disk drive for your BBC Steve? Much easier to use than tapes. Thinking about it I never did use or even see a tape drive for any of the BBC Micros I used over the years, and there were quite a few. Was there much software released on tape for the system compared to on disk?

I will get a disk drive eventually, but I don't really need one at the moment.

I really could do with a proper tape recorder so that I can record my own stuff as well. I am just using my Walkman at the moment.

[v85rawdeal]

I only remember ever having one game on the BBC, as we had one on the training course I was taking that we were allowed to use. But it was THE best game to have on the BBC... Elite!!!

[Harrison]

I think nearly every game ever released on the BBC was available in our school. Other kids would bring in a copy and within days it was copied and in every classroom (unofficially). Pole Position, chuckie egg and loads of others. Our computer and maths classes were quite good fun.