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You know you’re old…
…when you remember loading software from cassette.

Sorry this it o/t guys, but I couldn’t help sharing to a few kindred spirits.

0 thoughts on “You know you’re old…”

  5.       I still prefer to load software through tape balls to emulators. There's not a more nostalgic feel than putting in a tape waiting for the loading screen and making a cuppa in the meantime.
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  13.       I remember getting impossible Mission on tape.  The little insert said the loading time was 20 minutes.  It took less than 5. Nobody updated it to say that they had started using turbo loader.  YAY!
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  14.       Does anyone know what turbo loader was? I imagined that it simply copied an image of the already-executed game code block by block straight into memory and then "un-froze" it ...
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  15.       The c64 tape was slow in itself. By shortening the timings and using more efficient coding you could reach upto 5x better speed. Also, the normal tape routines would save each program twice and use the second copy to verify the load, so removing that meant close to 10x speedup for the tape turbo loaders. At the risk of misreading of course.
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  17.       Gotta love tapes! You set them up to load, go outside and play with your friends, then there's a chance that a stretch or pop in the tape caused a block not to load and you only find out 20 minutes later and have to rewind and start again! Still I miss those days :-)
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  19.       Anybody else have fond memories of the loading screens?  Rambo First Blood Part II.  Excellent.  Also nostalgia for US Gold, Ocean, Sanxion & Delta ;)
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  25.       I recall high speed turbo loaders on the 8 bit machines. C64 used the popular Nova Loader.

    The ZX Spectrum used Alcatraz, Speedlock (which appeared through 5 different versions), Firebird Bleeploader (that mimicked block loading from the BBC Model B)…

    Speedlock and Alcatraz loaders on the Sinclair Spectrum were particularly impressive as they not only featured loading at higher baud rates but also featured a decrypter which would decrypt the game code after loading which made hacking games for infinite lives somewhat challenging as you had to crack the decryption routines to make sense of the scrambled gobleygook before you could hack a particular game for infinite lives, etc.

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  27.       Wayne Ramshaw It was very hard.  perseverence of youth, I guess.  It had dodgy collision detection and you died very easily.  incredibly rewarding to beat though, with a very simple message telling you to do it again...
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