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Operating System Specific Discussions => Other Operating Systems => Topic started by: foleyjo on November 10, 2013, 04:19:51 PM
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FLlxq5LSlo&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Today's kids shown a c64 by someone who doesn't know how a c64 works.
Things that annoy me
1. He says about an error loading games and it worked yesterday. Well maybe if he didn't press runstop to break out of the loading procedure and why shake the tape?
2. Again he says the game has got a loading error common for loading cassette tapes. Errors were not that common due to the c64 datasette and there is nothing to suggest the game has stopped loading.
3. 10 minutes later? For buggy boy? Don't think so.
Basically he lies a lot and makes out common misconceptions about the c64 are fact in an attempt to make his segment on the news funnier but it doesn't work.
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Just keep in mind, the world is full of idiots and morons...
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Seemed like a pretty accurate portrayal to me.
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I've never seen a C64 with a tape drive. My cousin had a VIC 20 with a tape drive and I had a TI-99/4A with one, but by the time I got to the C64 (1988 ???) everyone had a 1541 disk drive and a Fastload cart.
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To be honest I thought it was a nice clip. He gets the kids interested and I think that's more important then if he is doing best practice when it comes to loading a tape. Also I don't really think he lies!
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Disk drives were rare in the UK. Most people went for the datasette unit and the majority of games came on cassette.
There is a myth that cassettes had high load failure rates and took over 10 mins to load.
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To be honest I thought it was a nice clip. He gets the kids interested and I think that's more important then if he is doing best practice when it comes to loading a tape. Also I don't really think he lies!
As I said
Lie 1 he says there is a problem loading games when he has clearly pressed runs top to break out of the game
Lie 2 he says that the game has crashed during loading and makes out it is a common fault when there is no evidence of a crash and load errors are rare
Lie 3 buggy boy takes about 4 mins to load not 10
I also find his presentation to the kids lacking. There is another video on YouTube of someone introducing his kids to a c64 and he does a much better job
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As I said
Lie 1 he says there is a problem loading games when he has clearly pressed runs top to break out of the game
Lie 2 he says that the game has crashed during loading and makes out it is a common fault when there is no evidence of a crash and load errors are rare
Lie 3 buggy boy takes about 4 mins to load not 10
I also find his presentation to the kids lacking. There is another video on YouTube of someone introducing his kids to a c64 and he does a much better job
I think I'm with you here. Only a few days ago I saw a Windows 7 Quad Core laptop with 4GB of ram take at least 10 minutes to actually load the desktop and be in a usable state. Crazy.
And load times from cassette tapes really aren't that bad. I think most of my C64 cassette games load up quicker than the average persons PC boots up.
As for UK users with 1541's, I only knew one, and he got his C64 rig in 1996... I don't have a 1541 either as I'm happy with my tapes and always have been. Might get a 1541 Ultimate one day though, but I do like loading games from tape.
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I'd say he's mostly right.
tape loading has always been very long (except with some turbo loaders) and errors were common (for people using pirated tapes, also azimuth..).
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by the time I got to the C64 (1988 ???) everyone had a 1541 disk drive
You were a little late to the party is all. Cassettes were more common in the beginning because the drive cost almost as much as the 64 (which was around $600 in 1982 US dollars). My buddy's older brother bought a C64 summer of 1982. It came with a cassette which I think ran more around $150. One of the games was a pacman type clone that would take 20+ minutes to load. Once you had it running, you didn't turn it off.
Fast-forward to 1984 and I don't know anyone who wasn't buying a 64 without a disk drive. I always believed Commodore made the tapes extra slow on purpose to get you to upgrade to a disk. :)
Plaz
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I'd say he's mostly right.
tape loading has always been very long (except with some turbo loaders) and errors were common (for people using pirated tapes, also azimuth..).
Even if you were right (which your not) the point is he didn't have any loading issues and the game he loaded doesn't take 10 mins. It seems that he wanted to make out the loading issues were fact so just pretended they happened.
It would have been much better if someone really passionate about c64s gave the demonstration and showed some really interesting games from the old days.
The only thing I found interesting was the lack of knowledge and difficulty using a joystick. It's amazing how kids can use controllers with about 12 buttons roads and 2 analog sticks but now a stick with 8 directions and 1 fire button
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well, I didn't watch the clip.
anyway, you're free to make a better youtube clip about C=64 and tape loading.
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holly beep, who cares. I can say that tape did take a long time, an did often fall over, dirty tape heads, bad alligment etc. To say tape did not have problems is even more crazy than somone pretending it did
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Who would want to use a datasette in 2013? It was revolting in the 80s - only those who could not afford a disk drive used them. The Commodore 64/128 were only enjoyable once a disk drive or two were attached.
It is like using a Amiga with no hard drive. Completely annoying with multiple disk swaps giving you RSI. If I am going to do repetitive things with my hands I want the experience to be enjoyable ... not annoying!
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Humans beans are the original multi-taskers. During the time it takes a tape game to load, the little tykes could be preparing themselves some tea and crumpets! :lol:
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Who would want to use a datasette in 2013? It was revolting in the 80s - only those who could not afford a disk drive used them. The Commodore 64/128 were only enjoyable once a disk drive or two were attached.
I still use my Datasette even now. And why wouldn't I when a tape costs as little as £1 including delivery from ebay or 20p if you find a game on a carboot or charity shop.
The snobbery in this thread about something as trivial as game media in this thread is funny.
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I think the 'snobbery' comes from childhood views. In the US tape was seen as inferior to disk. In the UK tape was the normal option, only a few could afford disk systems. I think you'll see bias in comments depending on geographic location.
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I think the 'snobbery' comes from childhood views. In the US tape was seen as inferior to disk. In the UK tape was the normal option, only a few could afford disk systems. I think you'll see bias in comments depending on geographic location.
Tape bias :laugh1:
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holly beep, who cares. I can say that tape did take a long time, an did often fall over, dirty tape heads, bad alligment etc. To say tape did not have problems is even more crazy than somone pretending it did
Over time turbo loaders reduced loading from tape dramatically, so the long time issue wasn't so much compared to disk.
As for reliability, the 1541 suffered from dirty heads etc just as much as datasettes, and I never had an original tape fail. Backups sometimes did, but copying tape to tape wasn't lossless so that was understandable.
If you kept your datasette clean and maintained it was an extremely reliable storage medium. I have 30 year old tapes that still load problem free as they have been stored well. I bet there are floppies that also work after this time and those that don't.
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Tape bias :laugh1:
I see what you did there. Lol
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To those who say 'who cares' and 'make your own video' you are missing the point. This wasn't just a YouTube video it was a news story on the BBC news.
As a news story it should be accurate and well researched. Instead it's some guy who clearly doesn't know what he is doing andit uses uuntruthsfor comedy value.
For those that suffered failed loads, then maybe you should have taken better care of your dattasette unit. I still play my c64 and I don't get any load problems.
Those that say games take 10 mins or more to load, the average load time is 4 mins not including multi load levels.
I know everyone has there own memories of the c64 and I know that some people won't change there mind, but my main anger is based on bad journalism.
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Tape bias :laugh1:
Ohh, ohh, please, no, my sides are splitting.
I tried my datasette once to load five cassettes in a game pack I picked up. 10 minutes sounds right to me. Not 3. And I could only get one to load. An hour well spent.
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What games and what game pack or did you just make that up.
The ocean loaders are between 3 to 3min 30 seconds long. Takes about 30 seconds for them to start and 30 seconds from them finishing for the game to start. So these give some indication of how long games take to load.
Also remember I'm saying average load times. There may be a small number of games with long load times but most companies used fast loaders.
Plus my initial complaint about the 10 minute load time in the video is that buggy boy doesn't even take 5 mins to load never mind 10
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As I said
Lie 1 he says there is a problem loading games when he has clearly pressed runs top to break out of the game
Lie 2 he says that the game has crashed during loading and makes out it is a common fault when there is no evidence of a crash and load errors are rare
Lie 3 buggy boy takes about 4 mins to load not 10
I also find his presentation to the kids lacking. There is another video on YouTube of someone introducing his kids to a c64 and he does a much better job
1. Maybe he had the tape running for some time without the C64 actually finding the game before he hit run stop.
2. At around 1:52 of the video, the animation on the loading screen goes too fast, and this is a clear sign of load error.
3. Not sure how much time buggy boy uses to load, but maybe he was adding the time of all failed attempts to the total time.
I think he did a good job with the presentation, because he asks the kids about what they think the hardware is, instead of telling them directly. And if he had been too technical, they would have just lost interest.
But what he should have tried with the problematic tape, is to fast forward it to the end, and then rewind it to the beginning. This was a method I used often with tape based games my C64, and it also minimized the risk of tape salad incidents. :)
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I think I'm with you here. Only a few days ago I saw a Windows 7 Quad Core laptop with 4GB of ram take at least 10 minutes to actually load the desktop and be in a usable state. Crazy.
And load times from cassette tapes really aren't that bad. I think most of my C64 cassette games load up quicker than the average persons PC boots up.
As for UK users with 1541's, I only knew one, and he got his C64 rig in 1996... I don't have a 1541 either as I'm happy with my tapes and always have been. Might get a 1541 Ultimate one day though, but I do like loading games from tape.
maybe you should try loading Win7 from tapes? :)
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Fast-forward to 1984 and I don't know anyone who wasn't buying a 64 without a disk drive. I always believed Commodore made the tapes extra slow on purpose to get you to upgrade to a disk. :)
In the UK owning a disk drive was uncommon. I never even saw a 1541 in the local shops. Sure hard core sceners had them, but there were far more people that bought a c64 & tape drive because they were cheap and the games were cheap.
I bought an oceanic drive in 1988 as that was the first time I had any real money.
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I still use a few 40GB HP DDS-4 tapes for long time storage backups, belive me they aint fast either ;)
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Who would want to use a datasette in 2013? It was revolting in the 80s - only those who could not afford a disk drive used them. The Commodore 64/128 were only enjoyable once a disk drive or two were attached.
Who would you want to use a C64 in 2013?
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Who would want to use a datasette in 2013?!
Mainframe at work still uses tapes for archived storage! If you pick a file that's been exported to tape a little grabbing arm goes and picks the tape and loads it in! Fun to watch it in action...but much slower then the SAN
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To those who say 'who cares' and 'make your own video' you are missing the point. This wasn't just a YouTube video it was a news story on the BBC news.
As a news story it should be accurate and well researched. Instead it's some guy who clearly doesn't know what he is doing andit uses uuntruthsfor comedy value.
he completely knows what he is doing. He is well known in the c64/retro scene in the UK.
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What games and what game pack or did you just make that up.
The ocean loaders are between 3 to 3min 30 seconds long. Takes about 30 seconds for them to start and 30 seconds from them finishing for the game to start. So these give some indication of how long games take to load.
Also remember I'm saying average load times. There may be a small number of games with long load times but most companies used fast loaders.
Plus my initial complaint about the 10 minute load time in the video is that buggy boy doesn't even take 5 mins to load never mind 10
No I didn't make it up. And I spent the best part of an hour trying to test 5 tapes. 50mins divided by 5 tapes = You do the math....
I think I'm perceiving a bit of Paradise Past syndrome. My recollection is definitely different to yours.
But I rarely used tapes. Disks took long enough on the 64.