The Story of the World's First Interchangeable Arcade System

[@prk55]

The Deco cassettes were more like a backup tape system than an audio cassette. It had error correction built in and could automatically find the correct point on the tape to reload a section. It was all this tape movement that caused them to stretch. The other factor was cultural. In the west Arcades tended not to be 24hour and so the machines were turned off and on more often. Incidentally Rom based machines were not instant on as they had to check the coin acceptor etc and it later version a hardware DRM check. Also some ROMs were actually EEPROMS which had a short number of read cycles and were susceptible to electrical noise. It wasnt unusual to see a corrupted screen in the early 80s.

[@cyberyogicowindler2448]

Eproms were sufficiently reliable (although not everlasting). It was rewrite cycles (could be only done outside the device) those were very limited. Things only get bad when EEPROMS are used as random access memory (e.g. saving highscores, or volume and last selected channel in a TV set). But modern SSD have the same problem and loose data after few years without electricity (basically they are DRAM with 1 year refresh rate - the newer the faster because bits got smaller) so nothing has improved at all.

[@Riz2336]

Burger time is definitely the highlight of the series of games

[@dreamcaster4754]

I don't remember seeing anything like this in the UK, pretty cool story.

[@doloresdelorto6516]

I think linking 2 phone answering machines previously modified you can copy microcassettes.

[@TheLairdsLair]

Interesting! I didn't think of that.

[@cyberyogicowindler2448]

AFAIK pocket dictaphones used such cassettes too.