(BBC Micros with floppy drives were common for education.)Īs for 'did they actually sell' cassettes - yes, in fact They Sold A Million. The market for the 8-bit micros in the 80s in the UK was driven by price, so the cassette interfaces were the majority here. It's the same for cartridge games for the C64. In Europe, disk drives for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 were uncommon. Yes, cassettes were common, they took ages, and they were error prone. * One source claims that the inefficiency was a response to the quality of audio tapes typically used at the time the PET was designed (mid-70s), and that only improved tape quality in the mid-80s made fast loaders possible. Tapes and disks were way cheaper to produce. I can't recall waiting more than a few minutes for any game to load.Īs for cartridges: Hardly any game or application software for the C-64 was sold on cartridges. Almost every bit of commercial software, and every quality crack released on tape -), had a two part loader, first loading a fast loader at normal speed, then loading the rest of the game at higher speed. In practice, it never did, because the tape handling / decoding was done almost entirely in software, Commodore's own tape handling routines were horribly inefficient*, and third party speeders managed data rates close to 5 kbit/s, reducing load times dramatically. That's 37.5 bytes per second, or almost 30 minutes for a full 64K. Theoretically it could, because the C-64's built-in tape handling routines had a data rate of about 300 bit/s. Theoretically it could take 25 minutes (or more), in practice it never did. Is there something I'm fundamentally missing? Is the only reason that people talk about games taking so long to load in those days that they only experienced pirated/warez copies of games? They never bought any for money? It makes me wonder how anyone could make a living in those days.Īlso, what's that part about "if everything went right"? It could also fail to load, even at that slow speed? Imagine sitting down to play a game before lunch, only to realize that the game has not finished loading by the time the food is ready.ĭid they actually sell commercial/legal software for Commodore 64 and other early home computers on tapes on shelves in stores? For full price? Surely those "genuine" copies must have come on the expensive-to-produce and impossible-to-reproduce-at-home cartridges with near-zero loading time? So if you had actually purchased a Commodore 64 game, it would not take "25 minutes" to load, but more like 25 milliseconds? You'd just slide in the cartridge and press "power on" and it's running right away? Even if it was really just 1-2 minutes, that would still be significantly longer than the slow floppies that I remember impatiently waiting for. I realize that piracy was absolutely rampant, so maybe people invested in separate tape players and then copied games easily onto cheap tapes and that's why it took so long to load them in? But even then, 25 minutes still sounds insane. You had to buy the two latter separately. As far as I understand, that home computer/console came with a cartridge slot built in, but no floppy disk station or tape player. He was likely referring to his Commodore 64. (Obviously, it doesn't rhyme when translated into English.) It took 25 minutes if everything went alright. The computer games were loaded in from tapes In the Swedish-language song " Nostalgi" by Markoolio from 2003, some of the lyrics go:
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