And you thought your old hard drive was slow to load!
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And you thought your old hard drive was slow to load! Ha!
@sjvn pre turbo-tape loaders, some games could take over 40 minutes to load on a C64. The technology was quite robust but painfully slow... Even with a turbo load it could be painful.
The venerable floppy drives were only a little bit faster, though again turbo loaders made all the difference.
These days I have a Kung-Fu Flash cartridge which makes it like magic.
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@sjvn pre turbo-tape loaders, some games could take over 40 minutes to load on a C64. The technology was quite robust but painfully slow... Even with a turbo load it could be painful.
The venerable floppy drives were only a little bit faster, though again turbo loaders made all the difference.
These days I have a Kung-Fu Flash cartridge which makes it like magic.
@drajt Which game took over 40 minutes to load - examples please! I don't think any game was ever released on a tape running more than 15 minutes per side, so that is the maximum time loading can take.
Also, even with the slow kernal routines, 40 minutes would load over 100 kb of data. There's not enough ram in the C64 for that.
I think memories often trick us. It was not that slow.
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And you thought your old hard drive was slow to load! Ha!
I just literally found one of these in the electronics recycle bin last month. Donated to the makerspace.
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@drajt Which game took over 40 minutes to load - examples please! I don't think any game was ever released on a tape running more than 15 minutes per side, so that is the maximum time loading can take.
Also, even with the slow kernal routines, 40 minutes would load over 100 kb of data. There's not enough ram in the C64 for that.
I think memories often trick us. It was not that slow.
@derSammler I've got some games that fill one half of a C90 tape, which was the upper limit I think. To be fair the longest games were multi-part, so you could play a stage, then had to carry on loading for each subsequent stage. I'll have to look through my box of tapes.
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And you thought your old hard drive was slow to load! Ha!
@sjvn Mid-90s, I'd boot up OS/2 Warp on my 486 with 8MB RAM and go and brew a strong tea. 5 mins later both would be ready.
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@derSammler I've got some games that fill one half of a C90 tape, which was the upper limit I think. To be fair the longest games were multi-part, so you could play a stage, then had to carry on loading for each subsequent stage. I'll have to look through my box of tapes.
@drajt @derSammler
It really was that slow. I remember Heroes of Karn loading around 40 minutes from the cassette. Long enough that I often managed to do my homework in the meantime
The reason the numbers don't seem to add up is that programs are stored twice on the tape for error correction [1]. I remember accidentally stumbling on that effect once before learning about this: a game that would fail to load actually worked fine if you hit run/stop-restore around around a certain counter number after the halfway point. Even as a kid, this was quite suspicious: if the game already works, then what on earth is it doing all the time after?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette#Features
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R relay@relay.an.exchange shared this topic
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@drajt @derSammler
It really was that slow. I remember Heroes of Karn loading around 40 minutes from the cassette. Long enough that I often managed to do my homework in the meantime The reason the numbers don't seem to add up is that programs are stored twice on the tape for error correction [1]. I remember accidentally stumbling on that effect once before learning about this: a game that would fail to load actually worked fine if you hit run/stop-restore around around a certain counter number after the halfway point. Even as a kid, this was quite suspicious: if the game already works, then what on earth is it doing all the time after?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette#Features
@Turre @derSammler I remember Heroes of Karn, that was a painfully slow to load game...
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@Turre @derSammler I remember Heroes of Karn, that was a painfully slow to load game...
@drajt
Oh, somebody besides me who remembers the game!
I have to say, I mostly only remember it for the painful loading time, made all the more painful by the fact that the game crashed a lot. I love adventure games but I never got very far in that, simply ran out of patience and tolerance
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@drajt
Oh, somebody besides me who remembers the game! I have to say, I mostly only remember it for the painful loading time, made all the more painful by the fact that the game crashed a lot. I love adventure games but I never got very far in that, simply ran out of patience and tolerance
@Turre @derSammler I have an original boxed edition of the game. I never got very far. Not only was it slow to load, but the graphics took forever to render...!
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@Turre @derSammler I have an original boxed edition of the game. I never got very far. Not only was it slow to load, but the graphics took forever to render...!
@drajt
Yep, I remember that as well. The stupid thing was largely coded in Basic, as I discovered when it crashed. The graphics drawing must have been at least partly machine code, but it was hideously slow nevertheless
@derSammler
