Loading retrogames on tape on C64

It took 5 mins to load a game with the "turbo". No wonder we played them for so long...
For Swedish readers, see more at spelpappan.se/2...
Update 120824: Someone asked me how it sounds when you play a data tape in a regular cassette recorder - and this is the answer:
• Playing data tapes on ...

[@spelpappan]

For all of you interested in the old days of the Commodore 64, I recommend the book, "Generation 64" - available at Bitmap Books: www.bitmapbooks.co.uk/products/generation64?variant=6969447619

[@kumbandit]

Hey friend can you tell me, were there any C64 copies? Like using the same patent, playing audio tapes, but slightly different looking?

[@spelpappan]

Do you mean the computer itself or the datasette? Yes, there were different datasettes - even different Commodore models: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette

[@manisekhar6927]

if you rеally want hеr bасk (and I knооoоw уyуou dо) you neеdtoо stop eeeevеrything and go watсh this vidео right nоw =>>> twitter.com/28b6ff78e5015b4ae/status/790853501416935424 Lоаding rеtrоgааames on tapе on C64

[@christiancosworth]

Never managed to play it...😞

[@gonzaloNMF]

I was raised in the 90's, so the oldest ways of game storage I was aware about were the cartdrige and floppy disks. It blew my mind learning that games could also be storaged in cassette tapes, it's insane!

[@johnps1670]

In the early days it was stored on paper.

[@UUUUUUUMAR]

@jhonps haha

[@RaptureMusicOfficial]

I grew up with the C64 and Datasette. Thanks for your video, very nostalgic! Best gaming times in the 80s and 90s!

[@agonygoes]

And now you are complaining about today's game loading times. lol

[@tobias4411]

Yes, kids of today are VERY spoiled. If they just knew. C64 was my first computer. So many good memories :-)

[@Saul_Soto82]

Yay im spoiled

[@roberthardwell3916]

i play rdr 2, the loading is 2-3 minutes yet i never hated the loading thing

[@j0nh2bad]

Sorry but finally your comment is outdated, there is no more loading ...2020. :) I Can travel back to my time now

[@itepk0522]

Still better than GTA 5

[@spelpappan]

You will hear a high pitch noise on the parts of the tape that contain data. Between every game there is silence, that is how you knew if the tape was empty for use or if you already had recorded something on it. I could put up another video of that, if you like.

[@LucasFerreira-jy9kw]

My mind can't process that this computer had 64kb RAM, is magic

[@ssdivizion]

I had one Commodore 64 back in the 1987,it is true dude,legendary times,entire school class came to my house to play something like this,hehe kzbin.info/www/bejne/nqPNm6iomdmijtE

[@rzgrabalskich]

64k is much enought for this: files.scene.org/view/demos/groups/farb-rausch/fr08_final.zip

[@c64cosmin]

@@ssdivizion Haha, name figures out.

[@bloodmapedit]

@Lucas Ferreira completely understandable, your mind is not a 6510.

[@paulmangan7100]

Gold. After what felt like forever the game would load and it was an amazing feeling. I look at the kids playing next gen and think 'if only they knew'

[@shifal0h]

Brought up some childhood memories. Played that game a lot. Nice video, thank you!

[@Schmidteren]

We had this. I remember all these little details. Didn't remember them before I watched this. All coming back. :D Cool shit!

[@shuruff904]

Why is this so amazing to me?? I had a 32 bit IBM as my first PC, and always wondered how floppy disks worked, let alone THIS! Truly amazing.

[@petrosmalk3150]

I didn't know cassette tapes were able to storage digital data. Thanks for this.

[@derekcartwright7584]

man the freaky trippy loading screens always mesmerized me O_O

[@dicetheboss7732]

Bring back the fucking 80s right now !!!

[@senanladnonu9552]

DiceTheBoss77 i miss those days so much....

[@swayybaby9772]

@@senanladnonu9552 we all do man

[@swayybaby9772]

@@senanladnonu9552 ik I’m 4 years late

[@MattyOfPassion]

OMG this makes me so emotional and happy ! :D I was just a kid and I LOVED this. Soo many good things I would never have had in my life if it was not for the C64 and my parents being so allowing of me exploring this little machine. Thank you for posting this. Feel grateful!

[@bastiaan0741]

I remember as a kid, I wanted one more than anything. We were at a warehouse where they sold one. My dad said no. I put it back. Then some adult came and said, 'hmm, this looks interesting', and casually bought it. i was furious to say the least.

[@raymondyee2008]

The only way you could enjoy what we now call PC games in the 80s. Nowadays Steam and GoG emulators make it so easy.

[@vedicpagan8852]

aah the memorys the raw anticipation waiting upto 20 mins to see if it worked or u had to start all over again young ones dont know how good theve got it ,now its instant loading no waiting fkin awsome lol

[@pflynn12]

VEDICPAGAN88 I can remember waiting way longer than 20, say over an hour, aw tape cassettes days a damn nightmare!!!!

[@pflynn12]

burteriksson Look dipshit I use to own 1, enough said!!

[@dava_arvarabi]

@burteriksson you need to chill out, dude.

[@ssdivizion]

This is me back in the mid 80's,magical times,haha

[@mertarslan8039]

What A Great Video

[@Skippy-id9yt]

I miss the clever mechanical technologies back in the day

[@Hunt1275]

Lucky that we only had to deal with cassettes for music here in the states. My neighbor had a commodore 64 that she barely let me play despite constant pestering. Everyone had an NES in the mid-late 80's except me, I had the 8 bit master system from sega. This is the first time I have seen a game load from a cassette, very interesting.

[@volunteerz]

I remember that the epic "Gunship" took 20 min to load. I also recall when the read sensor in the player got misaligned because of wear. It could then take many, horrific days to finetune the cassette player to normal operation!

[@marvin_james]

Oh man... These were the days... Imagine the freaking PATIENCE we had those days! :) Now, if we load a website and it takes longer than 1 second, we get upset... Good stuff man!

[@MC-kz9we]

yes, we had patience...kids these days have NO CLUE.... remember racing destruction set on tape...would take 10 mins+ to load a customised track/car... loved it though, the making it load was almost as much as satisfying as winning the race!

[@valalex2223]

When the games were loaded for ZX Spectrum, the sound, it was heard and the games were recognized by the sound, the counter may be more accurate, but you have to rewind each cassette to the beginning and reset the counter..

[@ebuhman29]

Loading games from tape taught patience

[@AdurianJ]

I had a floppy drive, thankfully.

[@senanladnonu9552]

James Jeffery it was an art to do the calibration for each game :-))))) using a small and thin screw driver. Lol.

[@sakal037]

This was before floppy

[@mattiasandersson2709]

I had both. Had to work every Sunday for three years to pay it off.

[@bastiaan0741]

Oh, as soon as I got that, it was a life saver.

[@andyukmonkey]

This is really interesting. You could fit so many games onto one cassette with this type of thing.

[@NeverAgain1985]

I grew up with this and Id love to start collecting and playing c64 games again but damn....i dunno, to go back to those loading times again in this day and age is just a dealbreaker. But I still love the system

[@whatever-yi1lf]

I remember the excitement when the game loaded and the frustration when it didn't. The amount of games i took back, they would test them in the shop.Better days then.

[@ronyholm]

I love this, C64 is an amazing machine with it's SID chip and "groundbreaking" graphics (by the use of "sprites" over a scene). I think I must go and dust my own off and play some Bubble Bobble and maybe code some BASIC;-) Good vid!

[@XziledBlog]

WHAT THE HELL, that Commando has better music than the NES version : q

[@spelpappan]

Yup, it sure does :)

[@MidBoss666]

Plays far better too.

[@kke]

NES always had horrible music, mostly composed by strange Japanese dudes with ADHD. C64 had awesome music and the sound chip was much better.

[@jussivalter]

It's because MOS 6581 :)

[@Trendkilla]

Was just reminiscing about this frustrating peace of technology. The hours wasted waiting on Batman loading. Back then patience was a virtue.

[@SteveMorrow8859]

I remember those years, though on an Atari. What was even harder is if you created a program that took you probably an hour to make and saved it on cassette, often times than you expected it would never load again. That's why I eventually took to copying down all code to paper when I wanted to expand a project. The screen possibly blanks here to speed up the load time. Good times! I teach C64 stuff on my channel, so you are interested in checking it out if you want. Thanks for the memories.

[@p0tat0es_nation64]

If I wanted to post this comment in 2021 I would say "still faster than GTA 5 online loading time"

[@leefang1178]

The good old days. First the turbo loader to load games/programs recorded at higher baudrate to speedup the load time 😁👍.

[@ThePreciseClimber]

"Cryptic" doesn't even begin do describe this.

[@jesuszamora6949]

+ThePreciseClimber Yeah. I know the tape drives existed in America, but it's pretty easy to see why it didn't hit big here. Geez, and I thought floppies were a pain.

[@vladowargus8793]

my first computer. then commodore 128. then amiga 500+... then PC... memories of 80-90tis...

[@bigmaxy07]

Impossible Mission to 30 minutes to load. You could have lunch and go for a bike ride and come back.

[@spelpappan]

Thanks everyone. I don't use my datasette that much anymore, though. Nowaday I only use a MMC64-card - but sometimes it's nice to hook up the old gear and give it a try :) In another project I will start building an arcade cabinet with a genuine C64 inside; I have so far succeeded in connecting the arcade sticks and buttons to the C64 and will now start on building a reset button, since I don't want to turn off the machine every time I change game.

[@micwiz]

Thanks for the memories :D

[@duglandjeanmichel2888]

Damn memories !!!! I'm nostalgic of this :')

[@DCHurlford1]

Them were the days. I remember the game Delta (1987) had a multi-load thingy where you could mess around with sounds while the game was still loading.

[@RomekStanek]

bring back memories

[@chiefbeef1003]

Absolutely fascinating

[@xxwendyx]

Does anyone remember the donkey on the roller coaster game I was addicted to that one 😊👍

[@valistrutu]

Name this game..... Ww2 era, birds eye view, enemy can't shoot you, they try to trap you..... If you ever find this game please leave a message.... Thanks...

[@RedSoul001]

Holy crap. That is a process but looks like it was worth it in the end.

[@GROENAASMusic]

That super high frequency noise from the CRT... Can't believe I was used to that as a kid.

[@IAm-zo1bo]

I like it

[@Edu19712010]

Muito interessante ver o início de tudo o que temos hoje. Obrigado por compartilhar o vídeo. :)

[@retrojoe1590]

My first game for the C64 was Cosmi's Forbidden Forest and yes, it was on tape. It would be another 6 months or so before Dad would break down and buy me a 1541 drive. I had to pull the "educational computer" card. You know, would help with my homework. :) Told him that they only made that kind of software on floppy disks. ;)

[@gcnelite5983]

I remember first hearing about tape games on the VIC-20/C64 and being like "how tf do those work" and now that I know how they work it's cool

[@spelpappan]

Cassettes for data storage was an unstable and slow method, and did not even have a lot of capacity - on each 30-min tapeside you could store only about 100 KB. This particular video shows the loading procedure of cracked games; they are compressed in order to tenfold that capacity to almost a 1000 KB. For this to work, you had to load a turbo loader first - which I do in the beginning. After that, you could load the cracked and compressed game, which had to be decompressed by the turbo.

[@kennethbaggerlarsen401]

Take back to the late 80`s please.... what a time 🤓

[@MarcinBujniewicz]

Waiting time was not the worst thing guys... who remember - ?syntax error in line... ? :)

[@ianwiese1]

I four one of these cassette drives almost brand new in a box at a thrift store, I knew about them but I've always been using ibm and other pcs with floppy drives and I'm thankful for them I wouldn't have the patience for these

[@spelpappan]

Yes, if you read the description of this clip you will find another clip where I play a data tape in a regular tape player too. It's really the sound of bits that the C64 can transfer to 1s and 0s. The difference is that my tape consists of cracked games, and his seems to be an original game tape. Putting data on cassettes was really bad, but also really cheap - that's why they used it then. And don't today :)

[@criznittle968]

Piracy must have been a breeze with these

[@tubical71]

TurboTape for cassette and Par64 Eprom sockets/adapters for the 1541, mid 80ties were fun :)

[@rkheno]

My young years thank you very much for that ♥♥♥

[@LendriMujina]

Imagine modern multi-terabyte backup tape drives being used for games like this...

[@RichardKincses]

If you think about it. It still takes 5 minute to play a game. Install, DLC , Patch.

[@Psylicium]

The easiest (and slowest) way to do it is to turn the tape head screw as far as possible clockwise (without tightening it), and then try to load something. When you start the tape, the screen should say "FOUND XXX" after a few seconds like in the video. If it doesn't, turn the screw just a bit (max 45 degrees) counter-clockwise and try loading again. Repeat this until you get it to work :)

[@ThePigmejus]

WOW!!! I am back to 1992... Nice video!

[@Drachenreiterklaus]

+Don Avan Sorry, but the VIC-20 was come in 1981, the Commodore 64 are from 1982. I am a geek from the beginning in homecomputers.

[@ThePigmejus]

Hr... I know, but I am back to 1992 because I have got C64 in 1992!

[@bloodmapedit]

The video can only bring you back as far as 1985.

[@ThePigmejus]

Yes, but a was 12 years old when I got C64!

[@Psythik]

I can't believe your camera's mic was sensitive enough to pick up the high-pitched squeal that CRT TVs make. Had to watch the video at 240p because it's driving my 25-year-old ears NUTS.

[@spelpappan]

Great memories.

[@104d_3rr0r_vince]

I love to see the reel rolling.

[@Psylicium]

No, not at all. The only thing is that if you try to load original games or another tape, it will probably fail due to misalignment again. That's the beauty of loading games from tape if you have tampered with the screws - you will always need to have the screwdriver within reach, because you WILL need it again for every Xth tape. It's really hard to get the heads back to "factory defaults" :)

[@gizmothehusky7676]

That's crazy how does a tape work for videogames

[@lepidotos]

this is the bane of epileptics everywhere, at least they also made disk drives.

[@cimexgames5453]

I just got my C64 from my parents, haven't touch it since -89, don't remember much but this video helped bringing back the memories some.. with the Turbo 250,

[@johneygd]

Great i guess now i do know how to setup a game trough the cassette tape player on my C64,can’t wait to try it out😁

[@spelpappan]

I'm not sure I get what you're asking - do you mean if the datasette plays music? It does not - it only reads data and transfers it from tape to computer, like a common diskdrive but with tape cassettes instead.

[@davidecongiu6173]

Aha I remember that my fiends and I used to dub a lot of C64 tapes, but each of my friends got a recorder with a different azimuth setting, so for each cassette I had to remember how to set that damn screw!

[@bloodmapedit]

Ah yes, the 80's when we still had time to wait a couple of minutes to load a couple of thousands of bytes.....

[@nickisdoge]

Have you ever put it in a Walkman and listened to it because you can

[@SuperMarioGuy12345]

+nickisdoge It'll just be high frequency noise...

[@nickisdoge]

i know i find it cool

[@kke]

A computer related radio show in Finland used to broadcast some small programs over radio that you could tape and play on your c64.

[@greater69]

Löytyy vielä niitä kasetteja. En muista ratio ohjelman nimeä mutta me käytettiin samaa periaatetta pelien kopiointiin

[@kke]

jorge kake Silikoni oli radio-ohjelma. Tupladekkimankallahan niitä kopsittiin joo.

[@rosanafalcao4038]

I hate the annoying high pitched beep that TVs used to make

[@spelpappan]

Sorry for the late answer; I did not realise that so many have seen and commented on this since I use KZbin mainly as a repository for videos rather than a social tool :) All you need to hook up your C64 to a standard tv is a pretty standard cable; a 5-pin DIN ha to 4xRCA should work on any tv-set. I could post a link, but it seems KZbin won't let me. This is only for the C64, though. Other machines have other connections.

[@ratscoot]

I had a 64 in 1983 and in 1990 i had it's succesor, the Cimmodore Amiga. This had a 3,5" disk slot and 512K memory. On the bottom of has a trapdoor with a input slot. For 50€ you could but a print with IC that booster the internal memory to 1M! I spended weeks playing "Defender of the crown". If you completed the game a maiden would kids you (the knight) of of you were realy lucky the showed her boobs. Great times.

[@mtxsith]

i still have one with tape and massive floppy...best times ever

[@spelpappan]

If you played truncated copies of an original game - i.e. pirated software, then yes - it took about five minutes just to load it :) First you needed to load a Turbo program, that could unpack the truncated file and afterwards the actual game file itself.

[@benny9588]

After i watched my classmate using a tape loading a game in 1984, I bought an apple ii with disk drive included from day one, one of the best decisions i have made in my whole life. LOL

[@spelpappan]

They are actually not that expensive on sites like eBay and such; and there are pleny of them still working - great quality! :)

[@lucazade6787]

I want a C64 so bad!

[@gonzaloNMF]

Let me see if I understood the process. You had to make the tape run so the computer could load all the info in its RAM, and then it ran straight out of the Commodore's RAM, right?

[@spelpappan]

Right. Some games would not fit into RAM in its entirety, so the computer would ask you mid-game to reinsert the cassette to load more data into RAM.

[@criznittle968]

Was the audio played on the C64 transmitted solely through data, or was that audio actually on the tape too?

[@BXclusiveRn]

this is my childhood

[@1codface]

Ah the good old days.

[@Agentt4777]

Thanks for the flashback lol. Great system.

[@ssdivizion]

I did this in the mid 80's...legendary times 1000 kilobytes=1 megabyte 1000 megabytes=1 gigabyte and this computer had only 64 kilobytes,compare this with current computers,laptops and smartphones :0)

[@Psylicium]

Check if the tape head is aligned correctly, or if any games are actually on the tape ;)

[@misterkrad]

you should save your games to audio cd-r , so the magnetic particles don't rub off and keep them safe on your pc or windows as wav files or mp3s

[@spearPYN]

I love retro computers but with sd cards... you can have the entire Atari or C64 universe of software on ONE sd card.

[@wonsku]

turbo 250...memories

[@highlife2713]

Memories....

[@15theoren]

I miss the screeching noise

[@stayrospaparunas3062]

lol ke too

[@stayrospaparunas3062]

+Stayros Paparunas me*

[@stephenmurray2851]

Good times baby

[@SE09uk]

Used to have 2 of the datasets and a backup board I think it was called ended up with a lot of c120's full of games

[@mrviggomartin]

i used a screwdriver to finetune stripes on the screen let u see if u turn the right way

[@thereasonforyou7048]

I turned off de C64 but i forgot the Commodore power supply plugged to the electrical outlet for 7 hours and I noticed he warmed. This can be harmful?

[@spelpappan]

No, the computer should not be warm if it's turned off but the fat thing between the computer and the outlet may continue to warm up because there's still electricity in it. It should not be dangerous but it does consume energy of course. Unplug the chord from the outlet to be sure.

[@User846]

Thanks for the reply. The problem is, I dont know how you can see if the tape head is out of allighment "sorry for my bad english :)"

[@tomw6190]

I used to do this all the time

[@gcnelite5983]

I really need to get a C64 for my collection, the trouble is they're hella expensive