I hate the whole loading times and dodgy tape talk of today.
It was very rare for an original tape to fail loading unless it was on the Spectrum or Acorn Electron.
The C64's datasette helped prevent load errors as they were usually caused by incorrect volume settings.There was just as many disc read errors from dodgy disks or drives.
Loading times were also not as long as people think. True there were some games that had stupid load times but then developers started to add turbo load features and multiload features.
People also forget that you had some great music while the games were loading and sometimes a game to play (Invade-a-Load). Both things I miss when using an emulator.
Having had a C128 and a Spectrum 48K I can tell you I never had a Specy tape that failed. Agree most people's issue was because the Specy alowed you to use any cassette recorder and people did. Even now (yes I have 2) you need to have an MP3 Player with a high mw outage. Old iPods work well.
I have never had "knock on wood" a 1541 Disk failure. Nooo! keep those magnets away...
Also the Specy was about 4 times faster in loading standard games than a non turbo C64. 4 mins vs 16mins for full 38K game.
On the bright side the C64s GFX and Sound swamped the Specky with it's 8x8 Colour attrubutes and pokey sound. But the Specy was soooo easy to program.
Ooooh I got all retro again and off topic... Sorry...
I don't emulate classics I use them.....
