I give up on datasette gaming!

Started by VictorLazarus, November 10, 2016, 14:40:38 PM

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VictorLazarus



I'm an avid Commodore gamer, but I've received too much sadness from my C64 in recent memory to bother booting up the system.

To be clear, I have 3 Commodore 64 computers, and at least 4 working Commodore cassette players. Last time I played, everything was fine. Now, none of those cassette players will read correctly, and only one of the C64 computers will boot up!

Its quite a frustrating experience, waiting hours for the game to read successfully and launch. The first time I put in a copy of Lazer-Force, and pressed rewind, the tape snapped!

So I'll admit, I have taken to emulating the system, and keeping the physical games for collection purposes only. At least when emulated the games launch more than 10% of the time, and are not damaging during use. And, I can skip the lengthy loading process.

So yes, I just wanted to vent a little. I'm a little envious of the fact that US Commodore systems used floppy discs, where as we in England stuck to cassettes. Which whilst much cheaper, are failing me now.

MVL.

Shadowrunner

I've never played a game on cassette tape. Sounds like that's a good thing!

zapiy

Yeah, years and years of use will stretch the tapes and eventually they will snap.

Own: Jaguar, Lynx, Dreamcast, Saturn, MegaDrive, MegaCD, 32X, GameGear, PS3, PS, PSP, Wii, GameCube, N64, DS, GBA, GBC, GBP, GB,  Xbox, 3DO, CDi,  WonderSwan, WonderSwan Colour NGPC

VictorLazarus

Yes, unfortunately it has become a certainty that my cassettes will no longer function. So this has become one of the few systems (owning originals) I don't mind emulating. Although the controls and visuals don't feel the same.

MVL.

Back in Time Sime

I have my tape games for looking and sniffing at for sure ;) , use the disk drive cartridge replacement for everyday usage... pretty sure that will load TAPs also, so the full experiance... need to check that though...
Check out my YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/c/BackinTimeSime - New retro review each Thursday...

Lorfarius

I tried to get back into tapes when I picked up a Speccy recently but the load times are just too frustrating. I ended up using my mobile and a bit of software to speed load every game! So much easier and much more reliable plus it costs next to nothing.

DeadVoivod

When I got my C64 back in 1984, I also only had the datassette (1530), and I remember too good what sometimes it meant booting up a game. One of the worst games on tape was Summer Games, as it was loading constantly for every single event. So you threw 3 times the javelin, taking you less than one minute, then you were facing a 3 minute loading screen until the next discipline was loaded, played for 1 minute... you get the idea. Worse was even when you played the events in random order, you had to wind/rewind all the time, and pay attention to that counter, that it's set correctly and not reset.

My cousin had the 1541, and 2 years later I also bought one, damn, was that expensive, 400â,¬ back then, so if you would recalculate to nowadays price, wow. Well, later I also bought a printer, as I was working a lot on creating magazines with Newsroom, and my cousin had the MPS-803, a 3 needle printer, which was so slow, it took minutes to print out a whole page. So I bought the Star NL-10, 9 needles, which cost me around 450â,¬, plus you had to buy an interface module to fit it on the C64 port for around 100â,¬.

Talking about floppy disks, later I bought a 1541-III from Jan Derogee. You can plug it into the floppy port of the C64, feed it with SD cards and it behaves like a normal floppy drive attached to the C64, and with the nice little LCD screen on the front, you could easily see the games you were loading. Sadly, I sold that one too :(

http://home.kpn.nl/bderogee1980/projects/1541-III/1541-III.htm

TrekMD

I've seen devices like that for other retro computers.  Much more practical and less of a risk of the media failing.  Did the games load any faster with the one you had for the C64?

Going to the final frontier, gaming...


DeadVoivod

The 1541-III hardware is based on a Microchip PIC microcontroller. This microcontroller does not emulate a real 65XX processor and therefore it cannot execute machine code uploaded to the drive (a function that is not supported by the 1541-III). Therefore it cannot act exactly as the 1541, and fastloaders will not work.

Garou

Emulation is the future of all of these type of systems. I say enjoy the faster load times.