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Clarification siince the author does not mention this specifically: Disk drives dominated the C64 storage market in the US, Canada, and Germany, while cassette

by TMWNN 2y ago

Clarification siince the author does not mention this specifically: Disk drives dominated the C64 storage market in the US, Canada, and Germany, while cassette dominated the UK and elsewhere. Thus, US Gold had to convert US disk games to cassette for the UK market; I presume that the rushed jobs the article mentions were for especially popular games, or when there was an unusually short contractual deadline for delivery. Given how slow the native Commodore disk drive is, one can imagine how much more painful loading a designed-for-disk game from cassette. Games were often abridged to fit. That said, this meant that slow disk transfer was not a handicap for C64 in the UK. Since tape was the medium of choice for ZX Spectrum and other rivals, C64 was on a level playing field. If anything C64 still had the advantage, because the Commodore Datasette is a digital format and very reliable, while Spectrum and US rivals like Apple and TRS-80 use analog formats and are incredibly unreliable that made people cry, groan, moan, and curse. Apple II's tape storage is also analog, but Disk II caused the Apple market to very soon move to disk-only (and Disk II is perhaps the greatest of Woz's many late-1970s engineering triumphs) so it didn't matter. Three things I am unclear on: * The extent of the above-mentioned abridgement process. My understanding is that both cosmetic things like loading screens, and sometimes entire portions like (say) a couple of the sports in the Epyx Games series, were removed. I don't know if there is a compendium of the abridgements; I don't see the information at Lemon64, but perhaps I missed it. * Why software crackers had to crack cassette games in the first place, given that they can be duplicated with any dual-bay tape deck. Was there a reason other than to say they could do it (see next point), and perhaps to allow for cheating? * The extent of crack intros for cassette games. In the US, crackers (then and now) put small animations before loading to announce themselves send greetings to friends and rivals. I'm sure this happened in the UK but the medium no doubt restricted the intros' size.

Jolter 2y ago
I think cracking had at least two reasons. 1. There was a lot of exotic copy protection going on, especially on disk. Putting data in sectors that could not be written by the standard disk copying methods was just the beginning. I don’t know if any copy protection of tapes was ever effective but I wouldn’t be surprised. 2. To enable the use of “turbo” loaders. Cassette games were released on standard cassettes that were maybe shorter than normal. But if you compressed the games using better algorithms, you could fit up to 20 games on one side of a standard audio cassette. Normally the turbo loader was placed first on the cassette. It would maybe take a minute or two to load. Then, the rest of the pirated games followed. You’d write down the index number of each game on the cassette cover so you could fast-forward to it. The reason this was called “turbo” was presumably because as the game took up less space on the tape, you didn’t have to wait as long for it to roll past the read head. The c64 could decompress the data faster than the Datasette could play it back, so there was no processing wait. Most likely even a game that could be copied straight over to another cassette, still had copy protection that prevented it from loading using a different loader than it was mastered for. Hence it needed to be cracked.
- jimsmart 2y ago
  > The c64 could decompress the data faster than the Datasette could play it back, so there was no processing wait. C64 fast loaders generally didn't use any compression whatsoever. They would cut the load time in half by simply only writing/reading the file once (whereas normally the load process actually read the data twice) - and then get extra a whole heap of extra speed on top of that (turbo speed!), by implementing the load in custom code, basically working at a faster baud rate than the standard C64 kernel code did.
jimsmart 2y ago
> Since tape was the medium of choice for ZX Spectrum and other rivals, C64 was on a level playing field. Kinda. While the C64 had its own cassette player - the C64 was very slow to load stuff compared to the others, until fast load came along. Part of the reason behind this was that by default the C64 actually loaded the data twice during the process of loading from tape — once to actually read the data, then it read a second copy to verify the data. > Why software crackers had to crack cassette games in the first place, given that they can be duplicated with any dual-bay tape deck. It was actually quite rare to duplicate games with twin-tape systems — at least amongst all the folk I knew. It was easier to load a cracked game into memory, using some fast loader (or indeed: from disk), then write it out again. > The extent of crack intros for cassette games. I recall that lot of cracked games showed an intro once loaded - the intro was often added onto the game, and often the tape and disk versions did this the same way (as opposed to a separately loaded program). This was part of the reason why folk were trying to write such small intros.
gerdesj 2y ago
My memory is grey, my eyes are bent, my back is dim ... My C64 now sports a USB interface and a vast amount of storage. Dad bought it from the NAAFI in Rheindahlen. It came with a "datasette" and also had a cartridge slot, which you seem to have forgotten about. Carts loaded in a few seconds, games on tape took 5-15 minutes. I cannot remember the price disparity between games on cartridge and tape but it must have been significant. A few years later we bagged a floppy drive and whilst quick, it was huge. The lead time to load being 3s or 15m is almost immaterial in a two hour session. You pop in the tape, tell the machine to load and go off and grab a drink or whatever. You note issues with Speccies but it was widely known at the time that you copied to chromium tapes instead of iron if you wanted a game to last. I think model names were C90 and D90 for 90 minutes tapes with those technologies. You never used double speed recording mode with games either. When me and my brother returned home to West Germany from school in the UK, Dad carefully plugged the power lead into the video out. The next school hols we got to play on the now repaired unit ... and over 40 years later, I still have it.
mattl 2y ago
Amstrad CPC owner here. We had a similar issue. Disk games were available but not as much as cassette games. Many cassette games were cracked and made into disk games, often with cheats available too.
- TMWNN 2y ago
  Is the Amstrad cassette format digital or analog? Put another way, did you cry, groan, moan, and curse at failed loads as much as your Spectrum friends?
  - mattl 2y ago
    Probably analog because Alan Sugar so it was built on the cheap, but it was also an integrated cassette drive so I didn't get the full experience of having to worry about volume controls. I also got a floppy drive (3 inch, instead of 5 1/4 or 3 1/2 inch again because Alan Sugar) after 12 months and it was a game changer in terms of productivity, but most of the games were still on cassette.
teki_one 2y ago
I remember getting a copy of SubLogic Flight Simulator II on a cassette. It was a longer tape than a 90m standard cassette and it was 2 sided. Loading times were crazy on that! (Eastern EU context) Cracked games came with speed loader "built in", they weren't bad to load, but we did have to fine tune the head position on the C64 too (often per game)! Floppy drives weren't really accessible for a long time (they were more expensive than the computers, which you were lucky to have at all).
weinzierl 2y ago
"Disk drives dominated the C64 storage market in the US, Canada, and Germany, while cassette dominated the UK and elsewhere." I can only speak for Germany and my bubble, but we definitely had more datasettes than 1541s.

by TMWNN 2y ago

Jolter 2y ago

I think cracking had at least two reasons. 1. There was a lot of exotic copy protection going on, especially on disk. Putting data in sectors that could not be written by the standard disk copying methods was just the beginning. I don’t know if any copy protection of tapes was ever effective but I wouldn’t be surprised. 2. To enable the use of “turbo” loaders. Cassette games were released on standard cassettes that were maybe shorter than normal. But if you compressed the games using better algorithms, you could fit up to 20 games on one side of a standard audio cassette. Normally the turbo loader was placed first on the cassette. It would maybe take a minute or two to load. Then, the rest of the pirated games followed. You’d write down the index number of each game on the cassette cover so you could fast-forward to it. The reason this was called “turbo” was presumably because as the game took up less space on the tape, you didn’t have to wait as long for it to roll past the read head. The c64 could decompress the data faster than the Datasette could play it back, so there was no processing wait. Most likely even a game that could be copied straight over to another cassette, still had copy protection that prevented it from loading using a different loader than it was mastered for. Hence it needed to be cracked.

jimsmart 2y ago
> The c64 could decompress the data faster than the Datasette could play it back, so there was no processing wait. C64 fast loaders generally didn't use any compression whatsoever. They would cut the load time in half by simply only writing/reading the file once (whereas normally the load process actually read the data twice) - and then get extra a whole heap of extra speed on top of that (turbo speed!), by implementing the load in custom code, basically working at a faster baud rate than the standard C64 kernel code did.

jimsmart 2y ago

> Since tape was the medium of choice for ZX Spectrum and other rivals, C64 was on a level playing field. Kinda. While the C64 had its own cassette player - the C64 was very slow to load stuff compared to the others, until fast load came along. Part of the reason behind this was that by default the C64 actually loaded the data twice during the process of loading from tape — once to actually read the data, then it read a second copy to verify the data. > Why software crackers had to crack cassette games in the first place, given that they can be duplicated with any dual-bay tape deck. It was actually quite rare to duplicate games with twin-tape systems — at least amongst all the folk I knew. It was easier to load a cracked game into memory, using some fast loader (or indeed: from disk), then write it out again. > The extent of crack intros for cassette games. I recall that lot of cracked games showed an intro once loaded - the intro was often added onto the game, and often the tape and disk versions did this the same way (as opposed to a separately loaded program). This was part of the reason why folk were trying to write such small intros.

gerdesj 2y ago

My memory is grey, my eyes are bent, my back is dim ... My C64 now sports a USB interface and a vast amount of storage. Dad bought it from the NAAFI in Rheindahlen. It came with a "datasette" and also had a cartridge slot, which you seem to have forgotten about. Carts loaded in a few seconds, games on tape took 5-15 minutes. I cannot remember the price disparity between games on cartridge and tape but it must have been significant. A few years later we bagged a floppy drive and whilst quick, it was huge. The lead time to load being 3s or 15m is almost immaterial in a two hour session. You pop in the tape, tell the machine to load and go off and grab a drink or whatever. You note issues with Speccies but it was widely known at the time that you copied to chromium tapes instead of iron if you wanted a game to last. I think model names were C90 and D90 for 90 minutes tapes with those technologies. You never used double speed recording mode with games either. When me and my brother returned home to West Germany from school in the UK, Dad carefully plugged the power lead into the video out. The next school hols we got to play on the now repaired unit ... and over 40 years later, I still have it.

mattl 2y ago

Amstrad CPC owner here. We had a similar issue. Disk games were available but not as much as cassette games. Many cassette games were cracked and made into disk games, often with cheats available too.

TMWNN 2y ago
Is the Amstrad cassette format digital or analog? Put another way, did you cry, groan, moan, and curse at failed loads as much as your Spectrum friends?
- mattl 2y ago
  Probably analog because Alan Sugar so it was built on the cheap, but it was also an integrated cassette drive so I didn't get the full experience of having to worry about volume controls. I also got a floppy drive (3 inch, instead of 5 1/4 or 3 1/2 inch again because Alan Sugar) after 12 months and it was a game changer in terms of productivity, but most of the games were still on cassette.

teki_one 2y ago

I remember getting a copy of SubLogic Flight Simulator II on a cassette. It was a longer tape than a 90m standard cassette and it was 2 sided. Loading times were crazy on that! (Eastern EU context) Cracked games came with speed loader "built in", they weren't bad to load, but we did have to fine tune the head position on the C64 too (often per game)! Floppy drives weren't really accessible for a long time (they were more expensive than the computers, which you were lucky to have at all).

weinzierl 2y ago

"Disk drives dominated the C64 storage market in the US, Canada, and Germany, while cassette dominated the UK and elsewhere." I can only speak for Germany and my bubble, but we definitely had more datasettes than 1541s.