To think us oldskoolers used to put up with this!

Nostalgia is great however this is one part of history I was surly pleased to see end. Tape loading was truly horrific and when I made the jump from a C64 to Amiga it was like gaming heaven…!!

To think, kids today complain about loading times they simply do not know what it used to be like.. :-)

Number of times i'd try to load a game when I was a kid - only to then get some syntax error code that was meaningless and the game failed to load, after waiting for an age, and not forgetting rewinding the tapes...

Oh and when the tape got snagged and chewed up in the drive..!! Never was there a more perfect excuse to copy a tape of a game you did actually own..!! lol
 
SkeeterUK said:
I will never understand why ppl had c64s as i thought specys were king between the two and amstrad bbc things.
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When I was a kid, my parents got me a C64 so it was pretty much use what I was given... It was a shared computer between the family, it was however mostly used my myself...

I always wanted a specy, however didn't have funds for one.. :D when I was finally earning money I got my first Amiga and went from there really....

Hasn't there always been rivarly between computers -

C64 - Specy
Amiga - atari st
PC - MAC

:p
 
Very true.

Amiga was good but atari i think had a better desktop system tho workbench if kitted out properly was rather usable but could be quite confusing and it looked visually crap compared to the nice bright colours of atari st.
 
Neil79 said:
Did anyone remember entering cheats though?, sometimes having to enter about a page worth of lines and then saving them to a seperate tape :D
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I don't remember the cheats, but i do remember the first anti piracy measures. You had a little book in with about a 1000 4 digit codes on anti-photocopy paper. You had to enter one of these codes before playing the game.

My uncle being the tight git he is copied the tape and actually wrote all the codes down.:eek:
 
Aw man those were the good old days, the anticipation of waiting for the game to load.

I remember those code books :D
 
RobRX-7 said:
I don't remember the cheats, but i do remember the first anti piracy measures. You had a little book in with about a 1000 4 digit codes on anti-photocopy paper. You had to enter one of these codes before playing the game.

My uncle being the tight git he is copied the tape and actually wrote all the codes down.:eek:
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That is tight...I wouldn't value my time so low personally though I guess credit is due for being such a diligent pirate! :p
 
McGray said:
I had a seperate tape deck for my 6128 and each game would only load when the deck was on a specific volume.

The only the way to find out the correct volume was trial and error and lots of loading to crash screens. :p
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Same setup here, I found volume 7-8 was tended to be a good level (although it probably depends on the tape deck to be fair!).

As an aside it was pretty bloody annoying having technically the 'best' CPC (at least until the cartridge versions came out) but still having to buy games on tape because hardly anywhere stocked the disks (and they tended to cost a lot more).

edit: did anyone else have one of those dodgy programs to copy games from tape to disk (had some kind of grey screen)? Most games it didn't work for, but there was the odd one where it would (including some of the earlier Dizzy games iirc).
 
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I had Robocop for C64. I still remember the day my dad came home from work and had bought this. Came in a big cardboard box with a Robocop poster :cool:.
 
Thread Title - "To think us oldskoolers used to put up with this!"

What do you mean put up with it. We loved it really. Oh the pleasure when a load completed without crashing............sheer bliss.
 
Nah, 'put up' is the right term. Tapes were an awful system and, when after taking ages to load, you had to use some awful 'Lenslok' system...

I defy anybody to go back to that nasty system of squawking cassettes and, hand-on-heart, prefer it.
 
wow takes me back to those golden days on my zx speccy and 48k and then 128k, and yes I was a 12 year old pirate with the cassettes lol

Use too waste my dinner money on those mags and use too dream about getting those cassettes home and waiting an hour before I could enjoy the shareware !

What was it Load "" command on the speccy ?

Wonder what happen to Ocean company they use too do some of the best games, that robocop one was so cool nice too see the later on levels :)

Scary part is it was only 20 years ago I was firing up the cassettes and id almost forgotten how bad/good it was !
 
Ahh yes... when you had one of those tapes you knew was slightly dodgy. Had like a 1 in 3 successful loading record. After spending an age fiddling with a mini-screwdriver in the little hole on the tape deck, gently positioning the EAR and MIC leads in just the correct "magic" way, and then... staying perfectly still, barely daring to breathe, watching the loading screen for 5 or 6 minutes...

Happy days!
 
I even used my speccy for serious purposes. The Last Word (WP), Masterfile (Database) and Omnicalc (SSheet) plus an Epson Dot Matrix Printer through a Tasman interface.
 
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Mark A said:

I had Robocop for C64. I still remember the day my dad came home from work and had bought this. Came in a big cardboard box with a Robocop poster :cool:.
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I bought this for my Amstrad CPC464 after a friend accidentally kicked me in front of a car and my ankle was run over. Thankfully I was in primary 5 and the trainers I had, used a lot of hard plastic so it was only a fracture but from the money neighbours and my mum was giving me, I hopped on down to a store (2 minute walk, 10 minute hop :D) and bought myself this :D.

Funny thing was that it was a girl's mother who was in my class that hit me. No fault to her though, it was my mate kicking me for fun and me slipping.
 
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