Hi guys, Just a quick link to a chap I'm finding interesting watching right now - Simon at Retro Computing Reboot. He won't be everyone's cuppa tea but in this clip he shows you 3 rock solid digital alternatives to old school tape loading on the Speccy and Beeb computers (and naturally you could adapt these to virtually any 8bit micros - just the edge connector specific one you couldn't) and I for one wasn't aware of the very cheap bluetooth alternative and how snug you can fit it inside within even a cramped little fella like the Speccy - for just a few pounds and a few wires I also like the final part where basically he admits why, at the beginning he talks about ditching tapes for a whole variety of sensible reasons, he actually cannot completely do this... his heart and nostalgia rules his head... just like many of us, because few of us can escape the final reckoning of the immense pull and awesome attraction of actually owning the lovely magnetic media packaged product harking back from our golden great years, ie. a bit like vinyl, you cannot beat having the gatefold sleeve, the artwork and the actual physical feel of it, handling of it and tactile joy of placing it in the tape deck/on the record player itself and watching the analogue parts whirr into action... I'll let Simon explain - Enjoy, fellas.
Righty, my thoughts, remember that, these are my thoughts, I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade here. The notion you can get all warm and nice from the thought of trying to load software for up to 15 mins from a tape system that sometimes would error at the end makes me wonder if folks are right in the bonce. I've told the story of me having to bin HUNDREDS of boxed C64 games because no one wanted them for free, and I had to move after my house was repossessed, there wasn't a single person feeling that warm and fluffy feeling then, and that was for free... Right from the ZX80 I had to use a tape, it was very hit-and-miss at the best of times, then the ZX81 with RAM Pack made that situation 100% worse as if the tape didn't fail the RAM pack would wobble, and you lost everything. But when I got a VIC20 I saw the other side of loading, cartridges. Now from the outset I wanted a computer because every one knew computers did things really fast, so even then it felt odd that these ultra fast things took so long to play a game. With the VIC20 you saw the issue right in your face. Tapes, slow and boring, cartridges, instant play, amazing. So I had it confirmed the problem was the tape interface, its baud rate was so slow and reliability was not great, slightly improved when they made specially adjusted tape systems only for use on that computer. Again, when I got the Atari, I had to use the tape, it was hellish slow, but it usually booted the game in the end. Again, carts were the preferred choice, but a bit too expensive to buy a lot of them (even with my discount). The C64 was a big improvement on tape loading, not only did they make software fast loaders, the Eastern Europe countries had started modding tape devices for the Atari because disk drives were to hard to get in those places. Sadly, there were fiddly compared to the C64 software fastloaders which were being applied by the game makers, so no special hardware needs But even with them, I still wanted disk drives and jumped to a disk as soon as I could afford one for the Atari and straight away on the C64. Disk drives offered the ability to branch off a game and have multiple play styles that tapes could not really support. Some tried by making you zero the tape indicator and telly you at points in the game to fast forward the tape to a certain number on the indicator and load from there. It was maddening and thankfully, didn't catch on. Drives could do all that on their own and at a smidgeon of the time. So for me, tapes have only one purpose, to look nice with their pretty covers and charm when displayed. Do I want to experience that god awful loading time, not on your nelly. So when I hear people waxing lyrical about the charm of putting the cassette in to the tape unit, maybe having to rewind it or having to swap to side two as it's the only side that boots, and then sitting for up to 15 mins hoping it boots ok. All that tells me is that they need to make more room in the mental hospitals. Tapes were an introduction, they were always meant to be replaced with faster methods, and those faster methods were meant to be a stop gap until the next faster way. Why want to return to the most basic way of playing, I see nothing of charm and 'of the day' in that, the covers and artwork, yes, the loading. No. Tape. with its in a line block after block are just inferior..
Hehehe. Totally disagree but that's what forums are for - stating your point of view and sharing thoughts and experiences. It's all we could afford back then and 90% of us invested in them all our paper round and pocket money, hopes and dreams that these games might give us a taste of a new exciting hobby that reflected some of the awesomeness of their arcade counterparts. Disks? They were for Americans and rich folks! Oh, there's no doubting the waiting time could be a bind but you learned to live with this and your mates would join you in that shared sense of expectation and "won't be long now!" sense of excitement... until yes, it often crashed!! Dbug on the Oric scene still likes watching paint dry too but I'm not sure he's ready for the nuthouse just yet
My gaming was almost always, me alone, and I had long left school in those days. Trust me, when it's just you, the tape loading time is just annoying. But that was my experience, I'm happy that others had a more joyous time. As with many things, it's a personal thing, there's no right and wrongs.
When I had my 800XL at first I hated loading games from tape. They tok so long and were unreliable. Much preferred cartridges but they were so expensive and hard to come by locally. It wasn't until around 1988 that I finally got a 1050 floppy for the XL but by then I had moved on to the ST with its wonderful 3.5" disks which just seemed amazing load time and capacity wise after struggling all those years with tapes. Nowadays I do have around 20 games on tape, mainly Mastertronic titles, but they are all just for show. I woulnd't dream of loading them up now. Modern storage solutions like SD cards are just so much more convenient, fast and reliable. Loading a tape now would just give me the fear, much like it did back in the 1980's!
In my book, Al, you can never get away from having something real to hold and treasure - hence tapes will always hold a special place in many retro gamer's hearts as that's when the magic started - first love and all that. The sentiments sealed up in that case, inlay, destructions, artwork, maps, media... they will live forever for many of us whereas the modern digital virtual stuff... it's no fun when it works instantly 1st time - I mean where's all the effing and jeffing there?!
I think people sometimes confuse the love of the media with the use of the media. As I said when I had to bin hundreds of real tapes in boxes, I loved their look and feel, the artwork was often amazing and to have instructions and sometimes a story was great, using the damn things on the other hand was slow, cumbersome and often ending in failure. I never hated tape, just hated using the things.. If you ever spent hours coding a crappy but useful little tool only to save it and then have the tape error on loading it, then you truly understood the hate of using tapes. That's what happened to me, I wrote a mortgage interest utility and payments database tool on the ZX80. It wasn't super duper, but it was many hours of writing. All wasted when it would not load back in for whatever reason. Hardly the end of the world, but very frustrating nonetheless..Tapes to display, great, tapes to use, no ta
That's my feelings exactly Paul. I used to love all the stuff that came with the Infocom adventures. And I still use my course guide and club chart when playing Leaderboard on the 800XL (still the best version of the game on any 8 bit computer). Tape loading though, I still suffer nightmares from trying to get Trivial Pursuits or Living Daylights to load on my XL
Lunar lander / mission is a great fun game on any system, I played it on the Vic20 so much I have the annoyed start off tune ingrained in my head.
