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Forums - Gaming - For those that can't stand disk load times for your games...

sguy78 on 18 August 2009
Darth Tigris said:
Forbidden Forest. Who's with me?

Wow, that's a blast from the past. I totally forgot about that.



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sguy78 on 18 August 2009
Star Scream said:
^

I loved the music in that one. There was a sequel as well IIRC.

Yeah, it was simplistic, but great.



WereKitten on 18 August 2009

Also, as bad as the tape was as a medium, it could store quite a good amount of content. Without using specially compressing loaders you could have something like 30 games on a single tape.
Or saying it in other terms, the tape could contain many many times the memory size of the C64, so that multi-load games could be designed to a whole different size over the cartridge ones. If I remember well a tape device was produced for the Atari 2600 exactly to break the harsh memory limits and develop some more ambitious adventure games on it.

Of course the tape is a serial access device, so sometimes the game asked you to rewind it if it needed a previous segment of data. Or sometimes you could not read a tape properly, so that you had to adjust with a screwdriver the azimuth (the angle between the reading head and the tape). The best - not original - tape devices for the C64 had an optional audio output to help the user in this operation: you literally heard when the sound of the data was not right and it acted as a feedback to find the optimal azimuth.

The floppy disk really came as a blessing :)



"All you need in life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure." - Mark Twain

"..." - Gordon Freeman

sguy78 on 18 August 2009
WereKitten said:
Also, as bad as the tape was as a medium, it could store quite a good amount of content. Without using specially compressing loaders you could have something like 30 games on a single tape.
Or saying it in other terms, the tape could contain many many times the memory size of the C64, so that multi-load games could be designed to a whole different size over the cartridge ones. If I remember well a tape device was produced for the Atari 2600 exactly to break the harsh memory limits and develop some more ambitious adventure games on it.

Of course the tape is a serial access device, so sometimes the game asked you to rewind it if it needed a previous segment of data. Or sometimes you could not read a tape properly, so that you had to adjust with a screwdriver the azimuth (the angle between the reading head and the tape). The best - not original - tape devices for the C64 had an optional audio output to help the user in this operation: you literally heard when the sound of the data was not right and it acted as a feedback to find the optimal azimuth.

The floppy disk really came as a blessing :)

It was a relief when the floppy disc came.



sguy78 on 19 August 2009
.jayderyu said:

Oh how I remembet those days.
LOADM "pooyan.com"
EXEC

I miss those days. They had awesome games, but tapes sucked so badly. I remember waiting a minute or two in some games cause they had to go back and forward at times to search data. Upgrading to the floppy drive made life SOOOO much eaiser.

 

PS.

if your still wondering how games were played
Most games back on cassete did not load continuous data. They were more arcade like in that they laoded everything in to a tiny amount of ram. This is where high effecincy programming was a must, not like some of sloppy guys today that just let brute force of a system to all the work. You won't end up with any great stories or epic games on a cassete though. If you wanted bigger games you either had a cartridge game or used a floppy drice. Either way this was a cheap writeable media. Also for those wondering yes you could buy commercial games released on cassaette. There were a few rare games that did proceduarly load areas bot just results, but those were far and few between.

I don't know if I am being overly nostalgic, but those were some good times on the Commodore 64.