I was sat there yesterday waiting for GT5 to load in the Widow Maker Championship series yet again (see previous blog for full explanation). I was sat getting impatient about the time it was taking to load back to the start of the race. During one of the many loading sessions (yep you guessed right, I have still not conquered it yet) my mind drifted back to what it used to be like back in the mid to late eighties when I played games primarily on my Commodore C64.
The C64 was a fantastic computer. It was a pure 8-bit marvel. Remember when the abilities of computers and consoles were measured in 'bits'? No? Well read on and count your blessings!
It's achilles heel was that shared by the majority of other 8-bit home computers around at that time and that was the media that the games chiefly distributed on in the UK. The cassette tape.
Now for those unfamiliar with the cassette tape - I know there are some of you out there that don't know what one is - it was essentially as small compact cassette with two holes in it with a long reel of magnetic tape that was pulled over a 'tape head' in the cassette deck buy a spooler that spun on one side of the tape deck unit. This was done at a constant speed so that the data could be streamed off the cassette and processed by the computer. Still with me? No? Well tough, go on Wikipedia and check it out.
This was all fine in theory but in practice the cassette tape was a nightmare. Tapes would wear out due to the fact that the basis of their operation was based on friction. They would naturally de-magnetise over time. Constant play and rewinding could cause the tape to stretch making data unreadable. The worst though was the constant threat of the tape getting snagged inside of the tape player and being chewed up rendering the whole thing unreadable and broke. Believe me, this happened on a regular basis and not just with computer software but with music as well. That's right, even music was supplied on cassettes back then!
If you got past all of this, there was the whole fiasco with regards to loading games. Depending on the game you could easily be sat there for 10 minutes waiting for a game to load. Now remember we are talking about 8 bit games here. Games would take that long that you were often treated to loading music designed to stop you going insane waiting and help pass the time. If you were lucky the game would load and off you went. If you were unlucky, the tape would either run right to the end and stop or just as the main game screen was about to appear you would be booted back to the main screen of the computer. It wasn't referred to as a desktop back then, because it didn't resemble a desktop. It was a basic information screen you could type instructions into.
Many games had multi-coloured bars that used to scroll up and down the screen whilst the game loaded. This tended to represent the data being loaded into the computer from the tape deck. It was also one of the first places you could see if something was going wrong. If the scrolling bars stopped before the game loaded it was usually a sign of trouble, though that was not always the case. It appeared to be the reserve of the developer to decide as to whether there was significance in these technicolour nightmares.
So, as you can see, it was quite the adventure loading games back in the 1980's. Incredibly it got worse. How? One phrase. Multi-load.
Multi-load was the answer to the problem of the lack of power with the 8-bit computers. It worked by loading in the main body of the data for the game then as it was loading a message would pop up and ask you to stop the tape and reset the tape deck counter to '0'. After you did this, you pressed play again and pressed any key. The first level would then be loaded in. If you died on that level, you would have to rewind the tape back to '0' and do the whole procedure all over again. As it was, by the time I closed the chapter on my life with my Commodore C64 it was fair to say that most of that time was spent waiting for games to load.
Multi-load also came in different flavours as well. Some just told you to reset the tape counter without stopping the tape. Some asked you to stop the tape and turn it over, some even came on more than one tape. It was quite an experience.
There was disc drives available, but here in the UK game supplied on disc for the C64 were hard to find. Not only that but the loading times were still long. The only thing you really saved was having to mess about with tape counters and multi load was far less of a hassle. It wasn't until I got the Amiga that I finally was able to put aside what I referred to as 'C2N Fever'. C2N was the designation Commodore gave to it's tape deck units it supplied with it's computers. It also was known as the 1530 and 1531. I commonly called it The Bastard.
So the next time you are huffing and puffing over how many seconds a game takes to load these days, just spare a thought to us old time pioneers that used to go through hell just to get a game to load.
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