Your dream Amiga?

[Sharingan]

Funny how we can even make a discussion out of disk drive loading noises

It takes a special kind of people, for sure.

The drive in my A500 was pretty bad also. 'Chainsaw' comes to mind.

To stay on topic: my dream Amiga, back when I owned an A1200, was always the A4000, with a ridiculous amount of fast RAM and a CD-ROM. The main reason for wanting such was Frontier - it ran a bit choppy on the A1200 (though, much better than when I played it on the A500), so I wanted to see what it was like to play it on a fast comp.

[Stephen Coates]

Maybe the strange sounds where to keep you occupied while waiting for the game to load up? It would be a bit boring if you were listening to a silence for ages while the game was loading up.

[Harrison]

To stay on topic: my dream Amiga, back when I owned an A1200, was always the A4000, with a ridiculous amount of fast RAM and a CD-ROM. The main reason for wanting such was Frontier - it ran a bit choppy on the A1200 (though, much better than when I played it on the A500), so I wanted to see what it was like to play it on a fast comp.

I can confirm that Frontier does indeed play much smoother on my A4000

Maybe the strange sounds where to keep you occupied while waiting for the game to load up? It would be a bit boring if you were listening to a silence for ages while the game was loading up.

Interesting idea, but surely the loading screens and especially the cracktros would keep you interested!

[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!

[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!