How Old-School Cassette Tape Drives Played Games | MVG

I grew up owning a Commodore 64 and C2N Tape Drive. I always wondered how games loaded from cassette tape. In this episode lets take a closer look at how the C64 converts tape data to binary 1's and 0's and some of the tricks programmers used to speed up the process
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#C64 #cassettes

[@mgsalmon79]

The nostalgia is strong with this one! C64 + cassette + Rambo First Blood Part II = CHILDHOOD.

[@norwegianblue2017]

I had a Commodore Amiga in the early 90s. I remember one game that you could not install on a hard drive, you had to play it from floppy disks. And I swear, if you did it incorrectly the first time it would self-erase or something. The pirating of Amiga games in Europe at the time was off the charts. Whereas in the US, there barely was any kind of copy protection on games.

[@Einar730]

No

[@marcusfranconium3392]

Ghost and goblins . a classic as well.

[@gabrielegagliardi3956]

Fist 2 music stuck in my head forever. My parent didn't care about music or art in general, so my first real exposure to music was that damn soundtrack, I was amazed, such a profound, dark and immersive piece of art. Fist 2 and It came from the desert 2 for amiga 500 made my understand the power of both music and how evocative could be for my little stupid brain ahha

[@freddiejohnson6137]

There was nothing like the feeling of going down to the local newsagents and them having a selection of budget games on offer then getting home with selection that you brought with your own saved up pocket money. Then after the anticipation of waiting while it loaded to then be disappointed to find out its a bad game. That was the roulette you used to play.

[@onequickthing8950]

I used to type them in from the back of Compute! magazine.

[@ewoknips5154]

I agree, it was definitely a gamble. And you learned real quick that some badass box art doesn't mean the game is gonna be as awesome as the art lol

[@turrican4d599]

Mastertronic!!!

[@Mr.Helper.]

Lol …. We were always tricked by the pictures

[@MrIrrepressible]

Well said

[@anthonybradley1555]

ocean software will always have fond memories with me, having lived in manchester all my life knowing that games like robocop and the new zealand story were being made for my home computer locally gave me a sense of pride, just being outside that old building was nostalgia overload for me.

[@KRAFTWERK2K6]

the game for Tim Burton's Batman movie, was amazing on the C64. They did great C64 software. In general the British labels were amazing! And way bigger than the german software labels we had.

[@pea-dub]

Me and my friend used to go to their office to buy games direct from them,it was behind central library,this video has brought back many fond memories

[@jasonlee7816]

@@pea-dubdid you take any games back if they were defective (faulty)?

[@pea-dub]

Probably but can't remember if I'm honest,it was over 30 years ago,blimey!!! Seems like yesterday

[@bazb2591]

Didn’t know this about New Zealand Story. One of my favourites and still got my og JAMMA pcb. One of the best soundtracks too imo

[@glitchy_weasel]

I am not from that era, but I always find modulation techniques fascinating - be it 56kbps modems or data cassettes. I find fun that people were able to "hear" to data being transmitted. It is just so clever, reusing old technology like phone lines and music cassettes to used it on home computers. Fantastic video, MVG!

[@str8ballinSA]

And you could judge by sound (of often used game) if game will be loaded without throwing "Load Error". Same as 56k modems negotiating PPP connection to the ISP, you could tell by modem sounds if it gets 28.8 or 56K (or something in between).

[@twoevileyes]

​@@str8ballinSAinteresting! Never knew about that. I used to get something around 32k, sometimes a little above that. But there in my city it never had anything near 56kbps due to the poor quality of phone lines (even calls were terrible most times).

[@clashclay]

Thank you MVG.! I love the fact that as a 35 year old American i still learn about gaming tech I've never heard or seen this channel is amazing.

[@greenkoopa]

Same here, I'm 35 and American 👏🇺🇸

[@juandager5220]

MVG is amazing! He even belonged to an underground group of "rom hacks..." There's videos about it. He completed an unfinished game on C with the author's permission. And much more. I'm waiting for MVG to have his own startup. Hurry up!

[@Atlas_Redux]

Almost everyone in Scandinavia had a C64 and tape-drive, so anyone above or around the age of 35 would know it. They were insanely popular here.

[@stevesstuff1450]

@@Atlas_Redux : Same here in the UK! Oddly, there were some games that loaded faster off tape than from the 1541 disk-drive! I was in my early 20's and worked in a small independent shop selling the new home computers, and after the Spectrum, the C64 was the biggest seller; we had 1541 drives available, but they cost as much as the computer back then, and so the C2N tape decks used to sell like crazy! And through random trials in-store, and from customer feedback, yes, we found that the tape could be faster!! 😆 For saving programs and data, then of course, the 1541 drive was much better, but most sales were for kids and games, so the cassette deck was perfect!! 😉

[@Atlas_Redux]

@@stevesstuff1450 It's due to turbo-loaders. Some bigger games and cracked games had software compression built in, though in Norway and Denmark it was more common to have a hardware turbo cartridge and avoid using software loaders as the loaders themselves took a bit to load.

[@sayeghjoe]

Oh mate, this one brings back memories. If you remember typing “LOAD "*",8,1” , you had an awesome childhood

[@mikeb2575]

YES !!! definitely mate😍😍

[@Mrshoujo]

Holding OPTION down on an Atari 8-bit while turning it on to boot a disk was far easier.

[@CathrineMacNiel]

Or LOAD "*",1,1 which is just load. But who gives.

[@hakrj12]

L337 Hacker ... POKE 53281

[@AnthonyFlack]

an awesome childhood and a disk drive

[@KarlRock]

My grandfather had one of these. But I was too young and could never work out how to make it load a game from tape! So I had to stick to whatever he had a disks. Dammit, all I had to do was rewind the tape and type LOAD 😅

[@awesome_dude332]

👊

[@Atlas_Redux]

I understood that at age 4, what in the world were you doing? Cheat-cards!

[@TechRyze]

Should have learned to read! 🤦‍♂️

[@JoypadDivison]

Load "*",8,1 was easier to you? Most if not all owners knew of shift + run-stop. Probably should have asked your grand father.

[@nintencat]

You make me feel old

[@chvasdek]

Unfortunately in Greece the Commodore 64 was way too expensive (without a tape or disk drive). The price was around the monthly average salary. So in 1984 I bought an Oric Atmos which was around half the price. At first I had no tape drive and I used to type in program listings from magazines. Then I bought a common tape drive not a special for computers. The Oric had an awesome manual from which I learned to program in Basic and 6502 assembly. I had no assembler so I had to convert assembly commands to hex code and I used a Basic program to load it and execute it from RAM. I believe it's mandatory for anyone nowadays to buy a raspberry pi or Arduino and learn programming and physical computing. Great video. Thanks for the memories.

[@stephenrobertson6025]

I started working in computer games by drawing loading screens for the C64, so i owe my career to the widespread adoption of tape loading. Funny to think of it like that! I remember I had to tell the tape loader programmer for Firebird how to load my Koala Painter format pictures as he had no idea how to do it. When I got the C64 in 1984 there was a shortage of C2N tape drives which was a massive problem because as is said in the video you can't use any other deck, so I was limited to typing in programs and examples from the manual and losing them when the power was turned off When I did get a tape drive one of the first games I got was Revenge Of The Mutant Camels by Jeff Minter, which had the normal slow loader on one side which took 20 minutes to load, and a fast loader on the other which took a couple of minutes. Guess which one I used... Probably the worst tape loader was the Atari Datasette for their 8 bit computers which was slow and unreliable. It used a stereo system where one track was audio and the other data, so it could play audio while loading. In practice this feature was hardly ever used and the single track for data meant that loading errors were common. No wonder so many Atari 8 bit owners had floppy disk drives.

[@vytah]

The main problem with Atari cassettes was the bug in the loader routine, which had ~1/2000 probability to fail to load a chunk of data - and since games were made of multiple chunks, the risk of failure was significantly higher, even up to 1 in 8 times when reading a perfectly good cassette on a perfectly good hardware. I haven't seen anything in English about that, but there's a Polish video "Cicho, bo się nie wgra! - Poznaj prawdę o magnetofonie Atari" that explains the bug in detail.

[@stephenrobertson6025]

Oh and even though I started my career on the C64, the most iconic tape loading system for me is the ZX Spectrum, with it's loud screeching, and alternating blue and yellow border lines. You could tell how well it was loading just by the way the lines behaved. I loved how the loading screens loaded, with the picture being built up in sections, followed by the colour attribute data being filled in. I never had a spectrum back then, but I played lots on my friends machines when I was a schoolkid, so it's incredibly nostalgic to me. I also liked the ZX81 loading effect with the black and white bars which were an accidental side effect of the same pin on the ULA being used for the tape output and the video signal. You could even hear some interference on the TV audio if you turned the volume up. However this effect doesn't work on modern TVs (even CRTs) as they just blank the screen due to being unable to sync to the ZX81 video signal while loading because the ZX81's signal is so primitive.

[@MaxOakland]

Why did it have a slow and fast loading side?

[@stephenrobertson6025]

@@MaxOakland Because it was at that time a very new technique, and wasn't entirely reliable - for example if your tape heads weren't aligned properly it might fail to load (I think I can remember it not loading on occasion). So there was a slow version which was almost guaranteed to work if you couldn't get the fast loader to load. Later when fast loaders became mature the slow loaders were ditched by most publishers.

[@fakewarfakewar]

Technology is amazing, even the old stuff blows my mind. They say the phone was a major invention, I think everything to do with computers was much harder. Like Waz building the apple in the garage. I doubt anyone today can just sit down and build their own computer from scratch.

[@mikipank]

In the former Yugoslavia, there were radio shows that broadcast programs and games for c64 and zx spectrum. Computer magazines advertised official companies that sold pirated software. On one 60-minute cassette, first there was always the program "Turbo 250" and then the programs that were cracked and ranged in size from about 6 to about 50 revolutions on the rev counter. So one cassette sometimes had more than 25 games. Cassettes were usually compilations based on genres, for example: adventures, shooting games, arcade games, sports games, etc. There were no laws on the protection of publishers' rights, and even if there were, no one dealt with it or took care of it.😲

[@VladK-1]

In my childhood in 90'es RU cassette game compilations have evolved to CDs with compilations of hundreds of DOS games/software, available on a flea market for a bargain price. I remember owning a disk with 650 games, there was a launcher exe to browse the database (each game had a title, a description, and I needed to press a special key (perhaps it was F5) to view a screenshot) and installation was straightforward. I've tried every game-it was fun for about two years, but among a few decent games most games were primitive, and there were many alpha, demo, and shareware versions. Then I've got curious and used Norton Commander to browse the file system of the disk. Mostly there were archive files (*.ARJ, not *.ZIP!) of games from the DB...but then I've located a folder with several large files that were not listed in the DB-a secret folder! It was like finding a treasure after digging for days, somebody just copied them there and didn't bother to ever mention about their presence (not in the DB, not on the back cover of the CD case). At first I had no idea what I've found, but when I've extracted the archives and started playing, I was blown away! These were the best games of the disk and the best games of my childhood-Dune II, Civilization and Little Big Adventure (without music). There were few other games but I don't remember now. So it was a disk of 650 games plus around 6 secret incredible games.

[@test123]

and pirates bought classical music tapes in stores becouse they were cheaper than blank tape :)

[@Zan_Jayna]

Wow, I didn't realize how primitive I was for having to type the programs in from COMPUTE! Magazine.

[@almiromeragic9341]

Yes, we had turbotape and game loading went much faster then original game

[@joe77andino]

My parents owned a C64 but it was Floppy 💾 Disk based. I had too look up a few videos on Cassette tape unbelievable I never heard or seen a cassette tape running games before ... super primitive and high tech when he explains it all in this video...

[@RAZKEN.]

In Sweden there was public radio stations that broadcasted the audio that you mentioned. Some nights in the week you could record some programs onto the tape. Pretty cool times.

[@Viking8888]

That is so cool! Wish they would have done that in Canada!

[@henriksundt7148]

@@Viking8888 It’s never too late ;-)

[@Atlas_Redux]

All of Scandinavia.

[@TheStuffMade]

If you got your hands on a tape full of cracked single file games, then they were often compressed and stored on the tape at a higher bitrate, making it just as fast to load from tape as it would be loading from a 1541 drive, but you'd have to write down the list of games and the tape counter position and do a lot of fast forward/rewind to find a specific game.

[@Atlas_Redux]

The tape didn't have a higher bitrate. You used a turbo/compression cartridge in the standard cartridge slot. Worked just fine with the original tapedrive.

[@V3ntilator]

@@Atlas_Redux You didn't even need a cartridge. There were a few software loaders.

[@Atlas_Redux]

@@V3ntilator Yes, but software loaders took time to load themselves. Far from optimal. So everyone in Scandinavia used cartridges. They were dirt cheap anyways and had more features than the turbo.

[@V3ntilator]

@@Atlas_Redux Yeah. On Amiga it were the opposite. Purchased games often loaded faster than cracked ones, because many of the homemade loaders were damn slow.

[@silkwesir1444]

It was possible to use filenames on tapes as well. Would have helped a bit with the situation you describe. If you typed LOAD "FILENAME" it would ignore everything it came by until it found the file with that name. of course that meant it may take a long time if it has to skip over most of the tape. so writing down the counter position of where it is would still save you a lot of time. also, these filenames were entirely optional on tape (unlike on disk), so you could save a program without a filename, and also if you type LOAD without specifying a name (like shown in the video) it would start to load the next one it would come across, no matter what name it had, if any.

[@CATinBOOTS81]

I will always remember how awful the loading times were on "Wonder Boy in Monster Land" on the C64: every time you changed a new screen you had to wait several minutes. Thankfully, many years after, I played the Sega Master System version: being on a cartridge, there was zero loading time. How wonderful finally being able to play the game! :)

[@danielwild5520]

I remember getting Shadow of the beast on a C64 cartridge, load times were really fast. Blew my mind back in the day when all my other games were on tape.

[@Atlas_Redux]

In Europe, it was more common to have a turbo cartridge if you didn't have a disk-drive. Then the load times from tapes was as fast as disk-drives and could fit just as many games (depending how easy they were to compress). Though, not instant like cartridges, but instead of up to minutes of load-times it was seconds.

[@TechRyze]

That’s what made the 16-bit consoles so amazing. Large games appearing instantly, looking amazing and having a full set of controls like the arcade, instead of a single joystick button 🕹

[@knukun]

Also worth noting that there were dedicated hardware to make tape copies. You'd plug two datassetes on a "splitter" that would connect to the C64, plugging the source datassette on one side and the destination datassette on the other, then plug the copier device normally to your C64 . You'd simply load the program, normally, and it would copy on the destination blank tape connected to it. Additionally, the 80s and early 90s were some interesting on a law perspective, as many countries had not laws to persecute copies, even for resale. In Italy for example, up until (IIRC) 1996, it was technically legal to pirate and sell any software as there was no law against it, so much that you'd go into a newspaper stand and often be able to buy magazines such as "Hit Parade" (with 30 cracked games, usually with their named changed to something similar) or "The Fantastic 7" and such. This led to many games using creative copy protections, such as TMNT, with very tiny codes written in black over a dark brown paper, so that photocopies weren't possible and you'd have to also manually copy those, as those codes would be asked on load.

[@antisoda]

Yep. A friend of mine had one of this. He turned it into a fairly large operation and made bank for a while. :)

[@Vindicator18]

The loading music on The Last Ninja games made playing games on the cassette a joy, and a memory from my childhood I will never forget.

[@rcherrycoke7322]

The Last Ninja loading / in game music was absolutely amazing.

[@Vindicator18]

@@rcherrycoke7322 the music on all 3 games, and Remix, was amazing!

[@Viking8888]

In Canada when I was a kid, the Vic 20 was pretty popular, but then the C64 came out and was HUGE. My Dad bought a Vic 20 not long before the C64 was released (the tape drive was included), so we never did get a C64, but friends of my parents had one and the floppy drive, so I was always excited to go over and play better games on their system, but the Vic 20 was still a blast. My cousin had a friend that somehow got all of these games like PacMan, Centipede and this really cool game called Scramble where you controlled a ship that shot straight ahead and dropped bombs at the same time. You had to destroy enemies in the air and on the ground but also fuel tanks to stay in the airborne. My brother and I had a sheet of paper with the counter numbers for each game so we knew exactly where to fast forward too to play the game we wanted. Thankfully the games we had didn't take long to load. I'm glad gaming is the way it is now, but those are definitely some great memories to look back on!

[@BGwControlStop]

Lol, I remember pirating cassettes by using a dual tape ghetto blaster and hearing the beeps and squeals of the audio . I remember the americas cup game taking years to load. Kids these days will thankfully never have to experience this

[@mikeb2575]

I know, even years ago I showed my teenage nephew a cassette game and told him how long it took to load, you should have seen his face !!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣

[@WilliamHaisch]

Downloading updates… 1MB of 350GB complete… Estimated time remaining: 2 years 8 months 23 days 6 hours 45 minutes… 😂

[@abadenoughdude300]

@@WilliamHaisch Yeah we're going back to those times it seems lol

[@zombl337og]

@@abadenoughdude300 not with high speed internet (i got 500mbps down)

[@Atlas_Redux]

@@abadenoughdude300 Nope. The problem now is diskspace. I have unlimited mobile dataplan at around 300Mbps, but "only" 8TB of M.2 SSD storage.

[@BreadboxBitfall]

Great work! A high-quality and thorough tutorial on tape drives is something that's been hard to find, but not anymore.

[@daddlertl3]

Nice to see some Commodore 64 related content here :) I still use my C64 on retro computer meetings and I also do some programming for the C64: Some days ago I released a video player for the C64 that I coded in assembler which allows to play back video + sampled audio from a mass storage cartridge like the 1541ultimate.

[@RemnantCult]

I would really kill to be a part of the personal computer boom of the 80s in the UK. The household programmer really had a home during that time and you could say it was the first time "indie" games really got its start. I would have been the girl hanging around the computer store all day until she got her own C64 or ZX Spectrum.

[@KRAFTWERK2K6]

It was also a lot more easier for a single person to create a whole game on their own without a big studio. Something that got worse and worse with 16bit and the 32 Bit age and so on.

[@RetroRanter]

Yeah my mom was part of that and that was crazy to me as a tiny kid just playing games of cassettes. 🤣 I like your style haha, hang around till you get your computer. 😎

[@norwegianblue2017]

You would have been a true unicorn back then. I don't think I ever saw any girls that were into computers in the 80s. At least, not here in the States.

[@Aaron_Somers]

This brings back so many memories of my C64 in the UK, we had a tape deck and a disc drive. I had a big obsession with The Last Ninja and never completed it. Great video as per usual MVG

[@lactobacillusprime]

Love the eclectic modern, older, old gaming subjects you cover. Pretty much exactly my cuppa tea. Keep doing your videos. Love them. Hope the move went allright and you're getting nicely settled in.

[@ehalil101]

Mannn this takes me back! My first home console was a ZX Spectrum and I always wondered how on earth we could play games from a cassette tape! Thank you MVG for a great video! Those long wait times back in the day were rough lol

[@croysk]

The tape counter was to be used as an index, so that you could have multiple files on one side of a tape. Blank cassette tapes came with an index card, which was often basically a table with column headers like "Recording" and "Counter". You'd reset the counter to zero after rewinding the tape, then you could fast-forward to the relevant counter number from the index to access the required recording. This came in very useful when you'd save your own programs/data out to tape, and of course when you made compilations of games, almost entirely pirated from friends, on a long-length tape (like a C90/D90). Seems rather strange to say the counter was "used to see how long a game took to load".

[@Atlas_Redux]

It was especially critical is you had a "turbo" cartridge (which really was a hardware compression/decompression system). Could fit 10-50 games on a cassette, depending on game size and how well they compressed. It was tough squeezing in one game over another without touching data of the previous or next game, and in addition save it a tad before the game you're writing over, so the title and info would load correctly.

[@onkelhiphop]

I remember that 😀

[@aleksazunjic9672]

@@Atlas_Redux Actually not that hard. You would load the game, save it on new tape , reset the computer, rewind and try to load from new tape. If it worked your new tape would be in exact position to save new game.

[@Atlas_Redux]

@@aleksazunjic9672 We're not talking about new tapes. Read again. Talking about multi storage with turbo.

[@aleksazunjic9672]

@@Atlas_Redux And I'm also talking about new tape with multiple games saved by turbo loader 😁 You would save one game (with turbo), rewind and load (with turbo) to see if it works properly. Then, your tape would be at the exact spot to save next game (with turbo), without these two games overlapping.

[@meetoo594]

I spent hours on those mini loading games, used to stop the tape and just play em. There was an amazing one called mixiload that let you alter the composition of the loading tune. They used to load really fast so were ideal if you didnt want to hang around for 10 mins whilst a proper game loaded. Used to use a cartridge called the freeze machine to copy games, Only thing it wouldnt copy were multi loads, but most of the games that used those were rubbish anyway. Also had an action replay which was much more feature packed, I recall ripping sprites out of bubble bobble and having them scoot around the paperboy map. Such fun times.

[@oldarcadeguy9412]

My first computer here in the US was a Vic20 and it had a datasette. I did not realize how uncommon that really was until watching this. This was really enjoyable to watch. New subscriber!

[@hystericallyme2239]

I remember this so well some great times, loading before school and praying it hadn't crashed by the time you get home. omg i'm getting old.

[@weareeverywhere6677]

We live in Texas and when we got a Commodore 64, my dad had to have ALL of the add-ons and the tape deck was what we had first, before the floppy drive came out. My dad made a program for the Commodore 64 Tape Deck, to help my older brother and me with our math classes, that he called Math Helper. He lent his buddy at Texas Instruments a copy for his son, to help him, as he was struggling with math also, and he just wasn't a good teacher, so he needed something to help his son relate and a video game, math tutor that made math FUN to learn was just what he needed. Shortly, about two weeks later my dad transitioned to his new job at Lockheed Martin, and about a month later, the game he lent out was published under a new name, across several platforms, including the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum... for certain specific reasons, I cannot say the EXACT name of the software, but you can probably guess, if you know the software of the times.

[@HybridAngelZero]

As someone who wasn't even born yet when these platforms were a thing, this is wild to me that games could be stored on flipping sound waves!

[@Atlas_Redux]

It's what internet-connection used to be, or actually partially still is. It's the exact same thing a modem does. Hell, some places even still use analogue modems.

[@HybridAngelZero]

@@Atlas_Redux That's a really good point xD I love that, it's so cool!

[@fakewarfakewar]

They have AI art now that is pretty darn cool. Waiting for Ai made video games and then waiting for Skynet. Heard they have or are working on some non human things that will be able to give birth to another machine. Yep. Skynet is coming someday.

[@BMR86]

I don't know if its the music, your relaxed voice, how you present the information, the clips, maybe its everything put together but let me tell you MVG, the nostalgia I feel from your videos is tremendous! But what's more impressive is you make me feel nostalgic for a system I never owned and have never once seen or touched in person! That's bonkers to me! The world of gaming I know is from the NES to now, anything and everything before the NES is completely unknown to me. Great video as always!

[@amigacoverdisk]

Great video, thanks. In Ireland, I had a c64 in the early 90s and used the C2N (as did everyone else, I never saw a 1541). I think a couple of things that helped the pain of slow loading was firstly, not knowing how much faster a 1541 could be (ignorance is bliss :D) and secondly the price of cassette games. I was happy to sacrifice 10 minutes of load time when most games, from a huge library available, could be bought for as little as £3. Especially when you saw how much a NES games cost!

[@conordia6906]

+1!! We got the C64 with the Ocean Hollywood pack. Platoon!! Amazing

[@trueakuma777]

My cousin had a Commodore 64 and he had the floppy drive, so I never used the tape drive for that system. But my family were given a Mattel Aquarius as a free gift for attending a timeshare presentation and it came with a tape drive system and I have to say, it was really a crap shoot as to whether or not we could get it to work. The big thing we did to help insure data could be saved and loaded reliably was to buy high-quality tapes for it, but that was only an option for saving and loading our own BASIC programs and wasn't really a cost-effective option for us at the time. Plus, once we purchased a decent IBM clone PC there was no longer much use for the old Aquarius and it got stuffed in a box and forgotten. For all I know it's still sitting in a closet somewhere at my mom's house collecting dust and cobwebs! But thank you for this informative and nostalgic video and stay safe out there!

[@daedelous7094]

Hey MVG, love to see the shout out to Armalyte in your video, one of my favourite shooters on the system with one of the most funny software developer house names in hindsight, Cyberdyne systems. It's also funny you showed the spectrum as that you can load in games simply by streaming the audio from *any* source, I think Stuart Ashen even embedded a small program in one of his videos for anyone to try and capture and run.

[@fffrrraannkk]

Something about the c64 music is something I'll never forget. Another thing I'll never forget is using a paper hole punch to make my single sided floppys double sided.

[@michaellong8812]

I bought a C64 tape deck and some cassettes just for the experience. It was slow, yet, awesomely retro. Great video!

[@jukkiske]

Next you need a 30min episode explaining adjusting the deck head with a little screwdriver to get original games working, because the levels they recorded on to combat piracy were so low, that the games usually didn't load at all. Except when the deck head was adjusted *just* right. Enter the "load-it" datasettes with knobs and level meters.

[@nal101]

As a kid with an NES, when I first found out that games came on tape, I couldn’t fathom how.

[@danielg.w5733]

I have known for years but have never looked into how it worked

[@anthonyjohnson2172]

the tape sounds transfer the data input to the computer , back to 1980s i have over 100 tapes at home

[@ghostwhite1648]

Def would have been something to have been born a decade earlier and got to truly play with the retro gaming consoles and computers more.

[@MathewSpearey]

C64 was also my first machine, back when I was about 5. Caused no end of grief for my dad by not rewinding the tapes properly!

[@TangoMike88]

Learning how these tapes work and the experience of loading software with them has been one of my favorite things I've done with the Commodore. I had a particularly good time using an old car cassette adapter to play tape sound files from my phone into the C2N! Even though I wasn't there the first time around, everything about these machines is just such a joy

[@SirRobinson510]

The things I’ve learned from MVG, I love this channel, I love listening to this guy on any podcast 😂 I appreciate it mate!

[@clumpyjamie]

We made quite a lot of copies on a twin tape deck (even with high-speed dubbing) but I don’t remember them being any more unreliable than original copies. They always worked ok as long as we used cheapo data cassettes rather than music tapes.

[@captain0080]

Dark times; load, error, rewind, load, error, self test... even the worst loadings times nowadays dont hold a candle to playing games from a tape.

[@fffrrraannkk]

I didn't own the cassette loader, but I do remember some disks took just as long to load. Strider was one of the longest ones to load. It was a copied game so I thought it didn't work until one day I just let it sit there and it eventually loaded.

[@crazykittenvideos855]

Great video. I remember a friend and I played one in a cassette player and wondered if recording tape to tape would work. We couldn’t believe it when it did! Game sharing became a thing for us. Pit stop 2 was amazing back then, probably sparked my love of driving games. Happy Commodore days! Also owned two Amigas 500+ and the smaller 600

[@Skint488]

I had a commodore 64 the tape version. Just watching this gave me plenty of fun flashbacks of my childhood. It's was a great peice of gaming technology for the time. I've got a PS5 and still I would put that down for just one go on a C64 for nostalgic reasons more than anything else.

[@Les537]

VIC20 forever. I grew up waiting 15 minutes for 4k games to load. I went through 2 or 3 of those drives. They always seemed to break. My coding adventure started on the VIC20 with books you bought that had complete game code you typed in. Imaging doing that now. :D

[@markdillon5494]

My favourite time in gaming in my liftetime was old school tape loading on my C64. It was primitive times and it was simple times but by god when you're a kid coming from playing Atari 2600 and VIC20 to the C64 its a quantum leap. Sharing and swapping games between me and my pals pirated on C60 tapes was great fun. The load times from tape NEVER bothered me. In fact it just raised the anticipation. I never had a disk drive till I got my Atari ST. Now I just thank emulator programmers for restoring and maintaining that part of my childhood.

[@Atlas_Redux]

In Europe, it was more common to have a turbo cartridge if you didn't have a disk-drive. Then the load times from tapes was as fast as disk-drives and could fit just as many games (depending how easy they were to compress)

[@rager1969]

It's interesting that the US had such a high disk drive ownership rate, whereas other countries used tape. I had a friend that had an Apple II (lucky) rather than a Commodore 64 or Atari 800 and he used cassette because they spent so much buying the Apple II that they couldn't afford the disk drive. It's also interesting how many Commodore cassette drives I've come across for sale in recent times. I bought three C64's in the past few years and got two cassette drives. I also bought three Atari 8 bit computers and got one cassette drive.

[@Turbo-D]

i had the same, loading time looks like: making coffee, taking a shower, go to work, come back late and its still loading in circles with hypnotic loading lines and earbleeding sound 🤣🤣

[@MegasXLR]

This is why I love your channel man! Awesome stuff that has happened in the past :)

[@BastetFurry]

Not all of Europe was datasette land, Germany most certainly was diskdrive land.

[@lactobacillusprime]

Excellent overview. Used one as well back in the day. Pretty much had a similar setup. The Datasette, C2N was a little more reliable than the cheaper alternatives that were in vogue in my neck of the woods Europe (the Netherlands). You had 'Slipstream' as a brand that had a lot of variants for different micros like the ZX Spectrum and others. With a turbo tape loader (from tape first program a fast loader) or better a fast loading cartridge it was possible to have much nicer loading times than the original tapes which could take a long time. Often people had C60 (C90 could have issues with the C2N) with a fastloader saved as the first program and than single load cracked games saved after that at higher speeds (noting down the counter settings on the inlay). This was the way to swap when you didn't have a 1541 diskdrive. The second error correcting load didn't use a second copy like the original tape routines did. Getting a cuppa was the way to roll, in my mind loading C64 tapes took ages. But with today's consoles the updates often end up me not playing the game as the downloads / updates take far longer than the update. Despite the fact that the download is significantly faster than the bitrate from tape. LOL. Still original tapes (second hand or on discount) were the way to roll as having the originals was cool. Sometimes the cracked versions did have bug fixes. The C2N was hell when the azimuth was an issue. The tape to tape C2N adapters were pretty much the only way to copy the tapes as using double tape decks with C64 often was a big pain. ZX Spectrum, Amstrad could be much easier duplicated on a double tape deck using the right recording volumes. Thing is the C2N had to rely on a specific signal strength on the tape - if the recording was outside of the norm used by the C2N deck it would not load properly. The 1541 diskdrive was the bee's knees back in the day but it only stored 170kb per side and a single fastloading tape with turbo tape saved games held a lot more data. Still the 1541 was the way to roll: C64 Disk Magazines, Demos were only possible and if you attended swapping gatherings the 1541 was mandatory.

[@HoffmanYouTube]

awesome video as always. comes at a time when I've been making my Amiga playback tap files to load directly into a ZX Spectrum :D

[@yatoheat]

What's up, MVG! I've watched your videos for a LONG time! I'm only 19 but the information you shown everyone over the years teached me everything about vintage computers and consoles I know to this day. I have Epilepsy to the point it's weekly I have a seizure, but your uploads keep me going. Thought I would let you know I LOVE your content and I hope you keep it up for years to come! Mention some more about the Nintendo Switch Homebrew and the enormous emulation power in said console if you need some ideas for a next Video! (I surprisingly own a C.I.B VIC20 that still works and I use to this day)

[@cheater00]

nice dude, welcome to the vintage community, hope you enjoy it!

[@blacknapalm2131]

It might sound weird but it actually made the loading process MEAN SOMETHING. You didn't just flip between games every few minutes like today. The Last Ninja games amazing loading music made it worth waiting for.

[@juliebraden6911]

Oh yeah, staring at a load screen forever was awesome ....

[@xgmode]

Nice video! My dad owned a C64 with two cassette players, the 1541 floppy disc drive and Power Cartridge back when I was a young boy. That was in the Netherlands. Awesome stuff.

[@CallousCoder]

Here another Dutch guy. Very similar setup dataset, (later)1541 and Power Cartridge.

[@StooCambridgeArtist]

Thoroughly enjoyed watching this video mate! Top stuff!😎👍

[@lboston4660]

when I was 4 years old my dad's company upgraded computers and I got his boss' Coleco ADAM along with a large box filled to the brim with games cassettes. Later on I found out they were pirated (legit Coleco games actually came in cartridges) but that one gift was easily 50% of my childhood... good ol' times

[@VulpisFoxfire]

I'm trying to remember if they ever sold ADAM-specific games on tapes back in the day...unfortunately, ADAM was another interesting idea that kinda fell flat.

[@loki.odinson]

I grew up playing Coleco Adam cassette tape games at my daycare center when I was a kid (elementary grade school). One kid also owned a Coleco Adam at his home, so he would bring his cassette games in and we would copy them to play on the Coleco Adam at the daycare center. Dragon's Lair on the Coleco Adam was my favorite by far, but Buck Rogers was really fun too. Good times.

[@ChrisRoth1972]

Buck Rogers was my favorite on the Coleco Adam.I can’t compare it to the Arcade Counterpart since I have never played or seen in the wild for that matter.

[@ScrapKing73]

It’s been said that the C64 was the last popular microcomputer that you could entirely master. That everything since has too much to know about it for any one person to know it all.

[@Atlas_Redux]

If you think you can master the C64, think again. There are STILL features that are being improved on and entirely new features being developed due to the flexibility of the system. And I don't mean by changing any of the hardware, simply by coding.

[@ScrapKing73]

@@Atlas_Redux Good point, and fair enough! :)

[@immortalsofar5314]

JSR $FFD2 anyone? Mastering doesn't mean knowing everything there is about something - just all there is to know, if you see what I mean. I don't do that any more, I learn the overview and then learn where to look to get the details. So WinSDK has 8 parameters to open a file, I've probably done that hundreds of times over the past 20 years and I look them up every time. I think, also, knowledge being memorising facts like a traditional lawyer, doctor etc has had its day compared to finding and applying those facts when needed.

[@Atlas_Redux]

@@immortalsofar5314 The definition of mastering LITERALLY MEANS KNOWING EVERYTHING. I quote: master /ˈmɑːstə/ gerund or present participle: mastering 1. acquire complete knowledge or skill in (a subject, technique, or art).

[@immortalsofar5314]

@@Atlas_Redux It depends on the definition of "complete knowledge". The one you are using does not exist - you haven't mastered "numbers" because you haven't counted all of them and there are always more. Progress in learning involves mastering the known and then researching the unknown. Then again, if we're getting bogged down in semantics, is it knowledge (that which is known) if nobody knows it?

[@TheTekknician]

Oh man, this brings me back to my Commodore 116 !!! I loved that little tike of a machine and playing games with my little brother on it :) Heck, I remember making my own games on it because Basic 3.5 was on it, iirc. I looked it up and I think I'm going to regret having lost the machine, since "only" 51.000 were made. I really, REALLY liked the cursor keypad!

[@Sien11]

Such nostalgia. My friends and I used to swap our games copied via radio all the time. Generally these worked well for the most part but sometimes you would have to load a game more than once. I remember using AGFA tapes in particular and you'd write down all the counter times on the insert so you'd know where to load a particular game.

[@LaMeGam]

In Mexico we had none of this.

[@tinman7551]

Myself and my younger brother would start the game that had “invade a load” on it. We’d wait for invaders game to start and then stop the tape play. One of my cherished memories from owning a C64.

[@AMillar1]

Thank you for answering a long standing question of mine. My first home computer was an Amstrad CPC464 and I've always wondered how games were stored/read from cassette tapes.

[@andreschiriff4354]

Great video when I was a kid I used to go Play with a computer like this and I didn't know how it work but it was an unbelievable experience at the time of course.

[@harag9]

Great episode, brought back loads of memories of the time I got mine in 82' Rambo 2, last ninja great games. I also had one called "Trashman" which took around 14 minutes to load via the cassette. Good times!

[@buckeyechad1]

You bring back good memories. I had a 1200Baud in '86 for my C64. Here in US, didn't know anyone who didn't have a 1541.

[@nathanielmills4678]

Wow, I never knew about the tapes!! Great video. My first introduction was the Amiga 1500 with a case load of games. Zool, Rick Dangerous, Toki, Pingball Dreams, James Bond, James Pond!!, Lotus Turbo Challenge 2, Elf, Another World, Flashback just to name a few. 38 now lived in London all my life…

[@roberthazelby4424]

Fantastic video. Back in the day I had a Spectrum 48k, the + and finally a +3. While I had a few games on disk the majority of my collection was on tape due to their low price. I remember the first time I saw the Technician Ted loader back in 1985. Seeing all those Teds walking back and forth blew my mind.

[@gianluca.g]

As a kid, I used to clone C64 cassettes using my parent's dual deck Hifi system. With moderate success. It never occurred to me, that an almost perfect copy can be made by just connecting together two datassette units, one playing the original cassette and the other recording to a blank. I didn't have any experience in electronics, soldering nor any clue about the actual datassette connector pinouts, so I never made the adapter to connect two datassettes together. Now I could easily build such adapter but I don't need to clone C64 games anymore :-)

[@KID_LAT]

That was my first system as a kid. Lots of awesome memories with my mates! Nina and Silkworm were my faves. Great vid mate👍🏼

[@jovanzeng]

Thank you SO MUCH for the nostalgia trip. This really brought back some lovely memories from back in the day.

[@Zerroth]

The first gaming system my family ever owned was the Commodore 64. I was 7 years old. And I had never heard of video games before that. My eldest brother got it for christmas and I didn't know what the hell it was. But he set it up and he taught me how to load a game. I played Midnight Resistance and that was the beginning of my video game (or computer game as we called it back then) obsession. We totally pirated or copied games. I have 3 older siblings and each of us would have borrowed from our friends or people from school to copy games. At some point we got an action replay cartridge. There were some games in which you only have to load once and all the levels were there. So we copied a bunch of them onto a single tape at one point. On the cardboard on the jewel case, we would take note of the first game that starts at zero on the counter on the tape deck. We would turn on the C64 with red action replay cartridge plugged in. then load the game using the tape deck. When that game loads(after 5 to 10 minutes or even longer), we would press the button on the action replay cartridge, go to the option that allows to save a fast load (I don't remember the exact option as it has been 30 years), you take the game tape out of the tape deck and put in a blank tape. You then hit play and the action replay is saving the game. After about 33 seconds or so. You press stop on the tape (can't remember if action replay prompts you to press stop or if it stops automatically). So that game takes 33 seconds to load. If I wanted to save a second game onto that tape, I could save it from 33 seconds. And then a 3rd game from 66 seconds and so on. Were were able to save multiple games on a blank cassette from either side. On the cardboard of the jewel case, we would have had something like: Side A game 1 000 game 2 032 game 3 074 game 4 115 etc Side B game 9 000 game 10 034 etc Although we would have the actual names of the games written down. If I wanted to play game 3, I would rewind the tape completely. Press the reset on the counter on the tape deck. Fast forward it to 74 on the count and press shift and run stop on C64 and play on the tape deck. Sometimes it works in one attempt and other times in a few attempts. If it fails, rewind back to 74 or maybe between 73 or 74 or something like that. As for games in which you have to load each individual level, we were able to copy an official game tape directly to a blank tape with one of those "radios" with the 2 tape decks. If the device could play the radio or place music from a tape, we called them radio. I remember we used toilet paper to fill in a hole at the top of the tape to get by the copy protection. Can't remember which tape it was but I think it was the copied tape. When I say tape. I'm referring to the cassette. We called them tapes. I never really heard anyone call them cassettes except on TV. The VHS cassette we called "the bigger tape". At least that;s how it was in a Dublin, Ireland suburb. I could say more but I'll be here all day.

[@turrican4d599]

In Germany we call them Kassette.

[@davidbanner9001]

It really was a pain. As a English guy, I only ever met two kidz in school that had a C64 disk drive. This all changed with the Amiga. But my computer history was Sinclair ZX spectrum, C64, MSX, back to C64 and then Amga. Also matching the correct volume of the tape input was also very important. Every computer/cassette deck had a sweet spot, other than the C64 which had a dedicated tape device. But copying tapes was easy and listening to that glorious original SID chip is still a pleasure. Not so much with the ZX Spectrum etc!

[@HarmonixJourney]

A bud of mine had a turbo loader that was called "Dallas". If you put that in a normal tape player it would play the "Dallas theme" in that data stream noise. Blew our mind when we found out by accident.

[@bikeanddogtrips]

one of the highlights of my childhood was playing rambo 2 - specifically the parts when you got the rocket launcher and when you got the helicopter. still remember my very first C=64 games - Pyjamarama and Kong strikes back as they came in a pack with the machine. The first game I bought was Hunchback 2 - Quasimodo's Revenge.

[@paulpatrick885]

Those Ocean Laoders on the C64 witht the SID tunes were amazing. I was a Spectrum 48k owner and when I first experienced a C64 loading Daley Thompson's Decathlon at a friends house and hearing the Rydeen loader music it was really quite something amazing being used to the modem style shrieks that the Spectrum had when loading cassette games.

[@InfectiousGroovePodcast]

Cassette games were so fascinating to me as a kid. I think the first time I saw one was on a Tandy Color Computer 2. Being huge into music, I think the idea that the format could be used for data as well just surprised me.

[@HicSvntDracones]

The commodore 64 tape drive is LITERALLY my earliest memory, I had to have been maybe 3 years old, would have been 1983, because we moved from that house in 1984. I was playing a game, I think it was something about going to mars, or being on mars, something like that, but i vividly remember the cassette tape and the commodore 64. It is no wonder that I ended up working as a Network Engineer for 20 years before heading back to school for astronautical engineering. The last time I saw that commodore 64 and tape drive was in 1995, not sure what happened to it. Thank you Commodore 64 tape drive.

[@croysk]

A few minor nitpicks: The C16/+4 need an adapter to use the C2N. The Commodore tape format, infamously supports error detection, but not correction. Adapters to use standard cassette players were available in the 80's.

[@etherus819]

Your videos are always so interesting!

[@TheWtfnonamez]

Oh my god that Commodore deck was an absolute dream after spending ages using a domestic tape recorder with my ZX81. Suddenly I ended up with a C64 and one of these at finally things would install almost every time. Fond memories.

[@trelard]

That soundtrack for Rambo is still one of my favourites. Hell, the sound of raw data for the C64 is music to my ears.

[@CinemaStormz]

This is awesome I really enjoy your content keep up the good work!

[@sergeleon1163]

This brings back some memories, as a kid i tried putting the C64 cassettes in regular stereo tape decks and duplicate them and listened to the sounds while trying to play it as audio. I still have my childhood 1530 Datasette unit model C2N CIB as part of my retro collection. My dad did build himself a fast loader PCB which I enjoyed using and saving me some waiting time.

[@montypythonish]

Nice video. It was great to see & hear some of the old load screens. My 1st was a Commodore Vic20 in the Xmas of 1982. And as an early teen back then it was fantastic all 3.5 K of RAM. The sound and so many colours (8 if memory serves). And we didn't mind the wait times as we didn't have anything better. It was nice to find out why we couldn't copy eachothers games. Thumbs up.

[@Mattsretiring]

Australian here. I had a C64 with disk drive. I thought I was king! Especially when friends were trying to load America's Cup racing and it would inevitably fail when the tape needed to be changed.

[@larrs8887]

As always very informative video :) I never had a tape drive myself but remember visiting a friend who was a little older than me and he had a c64 with the tape drive, gaming sessions were not a quick activity!

[@WhoNeedsNormal]

I've made videos where I mentioned the cassette tape system for gaming in other countries, but I never actually understood how it works. Great video!

[@rwlynch3468]

C64 was my first computer, circa 1990. Waiting for it to load was frustrating but the norm. The SNES in 1992 blewy mind when you turned it on and the games started. But I've never thought about watching how these C64 games would load. Interesting video.

[@dalwindersingh2322]

Great Video! I remember trying to backup :-) games as a 13 year old using friends tape tp tape HiFi's and using the dual datasette adaptor with mixed results. In the end the solution was simple! 2 pins from the 1541 port on the original Commodore 64 carried the audio signal and I would just plug this into my single deck hifi and hit record and get a perfect copy :-) I also owned and loved every version of the Action Replay cartridges. Had so much fun and learned loads. Thanks for this trip down memory lane!

[@chuckrock9510]

Very nice stuff man!!! 👍 Please do more like these!!! I'm a Commodore and AMIGA fan and I like vintage computers!!! 😎

[@sicpuppy9435]

This brings back memories I had a large collection of game cassettes which were readily available in Australia for the Commodore 64. I did later upgrade to the 1541 disc drive which was great for copying games to share with friends...........

[@BsktImp]

Oh man, too much nostalgia. Used to look forward to getting computer magazines every month with a cassette stuck on the front. Happy days.

[@jibkas]

Hearing that loading tape sound brought back many memories 😃

[@anFy81]

YES one of my first gaming memories was playing on my neighbors C64 with cassettes - winding to what ever ha has noted down as starting point and then on the blue screen typing run/play etc thank you for this!

[@boburdz2020]

Im lucky to be born in 90's. Cant imagine waiting for a lot of time just to play one game dude. Interesting info i dont know about. Thanks for sharing.

[@abadenoughdude300]

It was a much slower time, everyone was more patient and found things to do while the game was loading. Absolutely wouldn't want to relive those load times again tho, it was such a waste of time. xD

[@AndrasMihalyi]

Those were slower times...

[@namco003]

Awesome. American here. C64 was our first computer back in the day and we had the tape drive starting out. We rarely used it, and we later got the 1541 drive, which was way easier to work with. It mainly stayed in my brothers room, especially after I got a Nintendo, but I would always use it when he wasn't home to go on BBS's and download cracked games.😀

[@TheParagade]

I don't know if it missed it in previous videos, or if this is the first video with it, but I love your new filming setup, it looks really good!