When did they have games on tape?
Comment on Are those of us who grew up on older games more attuned to latency?
jordanlund@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I feel the opposite when I hear people complain about load times… “We want you to buy our SSD so your gsme will boot in 11 seconds instead of 19 seconds!”
Son, let me tell you about loading games from casette tape.
You’d start it loading, get up and go have dinner with the family. After 30 minutes, maybe it would be done. Maybe.
Maybe it hit an error 5 minutes after you walked away and now you need to re-wind and try again.
LaggyKar@programming.dev 1 day ago
Redredme@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Oh, you sweet summer child…
Up to the 90s my friend. Then 3.5 floppy"s took over (1.44 MEGAbyte!) then came zip (100MB) but only for rich people, then it became the era of CD and later dvd burning. Internet was not measured in mbits back then and most of the time not even in kbits. The internet was not a valid delivery system. It was slow and very expensive. Also the first memory cards (CF) around the millennium and from there it went on to the 10s and around there you got the pivot to what we have now.
Tape is still around in computing; its cheap, it’s cheerful, dependable and has quite a throughput. Seeking on it is still horrible though. But anyway, watching a real mechanised tapelibrary do it’s thing backing up computer systems is still mesmerizing.
FigMcLargeHuge@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
You left out 5 1/4 floppy disks that were actually floppy. Yes, I know there are 8" floppies but those were mostly business use and specialized drives that you didn’t really get in the home computer market. Atari, Commodore, Radio Shack, etc all had 5 1/4" floppy drive, and when I got my first box of floppies, it was $50 of early 1980’s money for 10 disks. And on my Atari they held about 90K wroth of space.
Acamon@lemmy.world 1 day ago
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 19 hours ago
Definitely also a thing in Germany. Alongside magazines printing source codes of games for you to type off.
Jrockwar@feddit.uk 1 day ago
The generation of Amstrad, Spectrum etc had the games on tape. I would say they were the closest thing to a console pre-NES, so 1980s. I had an amstrad that was handed down to me by a friend of an older sister and it had tapes like this.
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
C64, for one!
Hawke@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Late 1970s / early 1980s.
jordanlund@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Atari 2600:
Redredme@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Nobody had this, it was way too expensive for what it was. Everybody just kept saving for a msx or Commodore and skipped this.
jordanlund@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I had one, I had the tape drive for the Commodore 64 as well.
The Supercharger back in the day wasn’t that expensive, about $70 or the price of 2 games, because you had to supply your own tape player, the supercharger just connected to it with a wire.
BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Beginning of file not found… Shit, didn’t rewind it far enough