The cassettes: the cursed computer support of the 80s
In the 1980s, computers were popular that loaded games and programs mainly via regular audio cassettes on which the data was recorded, which meant extremely slow loading times and cumbersome data handling, because they could only be read sequentially going forward.
Cassettes have been the most famous and widespread medium ever for computers such as the Commodore 64, although there were also other ways to load games and programs on these systems, using cartridges and floppy disks, which however had an extremely limited diffusion for three reasons:
- cartridges were very expensive compared to cassettes and only a few games and programs were produced on this medium;
- floppy disk readers were very expensive, at first they cost as much as the computer itself, while the house players were cheap;
- games and programs on floppy were much less available than those on tape and above all they were more expensive and less capacious.
The cassette was therefore the most popular medium for computers of the 1980s, and since the masses used them mainly for gaming, there was a fairly intense use of these supports by owners of computers such as the Commodore 64 and although it is was in fact the most cumbersome support for playing in history, it is undeniable that today it is a means to more faithfully relive the experience of using a Commodore 64.
For single load games, not included in compilations but present on their own in the side of the cassette, this support was acceptable to play, but it was not for games that had separate loading of levels or included in compilations with many titles.
In short, the problems with cassettes were the greater the more one wanted to play complex games or game compilations.
There were some issues that many will have forgotten over time, but just try to reuse the cassettes to play to realize how things are:
- In Italy, the most popular games were those found on compilations at newsstands, the famous newsstand boxes. Even if the newsstand games took little to load, they were all stuck in sequence on a cassette and under false names, which means that you had to first find the game by loading slowly one at a time, figure out what it was, write down the number ( and so far nothing annoying), but every time you wanted to play them individually you had to waste a lot of time going back and forth in the box to find the starting number. And in the compilations with many games (there were even 30 of them) it was a terrible torture.
- The original complex games had long loadings, often very long as for the more elaborate arcade conversions or for the simulations that seemed torture as these times were long. Often for such games only one side of the cassette was not enough, but it was also necessary to turn it over and load from the second side before playing.
- The structure of the cassette created frustrating situations bordering on absurdity for games with separate level loading. In fact, when after waiting a long time to load the main menu, then you proceeded to load the first level and so on, but what happened when you died? You had to rewind the tape BEFORE the main menu, reload the main menu and start slowly reloading levels again. Since the games were very difficult, you died very easily and therefore forced you to go back and forth which was often a torture, especially with shooters where they killed you in a short time. And the games back then required you to replay them over and over again in order to move forward, so imagine how good it was to go back and forth over and over again with the slow-moving tape loads!
Since the games were short-lived due to the high difficulty, this meant that, with this multi-loading system from cassette, the loading time often lasted longer than the game time.
- Given the proliferation of compilations from newsstands, it was at least essential to note the number of the spins counter at which the game was loaded, although it is difficult for the cassettes to come out already with the indication of the number of spins at which the game was present, since such number varied according to the cassette player model and therefore would have been unreliable numbers.
In fact, cassette players, known as datassettes, if they were different models or brands could report a different number of revolutions, because the counter could be faster than another model or brand.
So, if you broke a datassette and bought a different one, or if you had two different ones, there was a real possibility that the laps you wrote down with difficulty with the original reader were no longer valid.
- It was not uncommon for the loading of a cassette to generate an error. In fact, the cassettes brought the inconvenience that sometimes to be able to read them you had to go crazy by adjusting the screw of the reader head with a screwdriver millimetrically, only to realize that now you could read some cassettes well but others you could not read them well!
Pirate or newsstand cassettes could often lead to these problems, but there were also games that required perfect calibration of the cassette player to load correctly.
- The players of games on cassettes, called datassettes, age very badly, and it is very likely that nowadays they have malfunctions or even that they work well but with use they can break in a few days. This is because the datassettes are affected not only by the misalignment of the head, but also by the stiffening of the belt, by the deformation of the spring that pushes the cassette onto the head from above, and by the hardening of the rubber that rotates. And when the belt is changed, everything does not magically go into place, because the belt speed also changes and therefore the motor speed must be adjusted.
But this is more normal than you think, datassettes have not been designed to last until today, regardless of use, because for example the soft components harden and the springs deform even if they have never been used.
- Tapes seem to resist demagnetization better, but this is only true if you fully rewind the cassette after using it, without leaving a portion of the tape with data exposed underneath. In fact, even if carefully stored in its original case, this exposed part of the tape is subject to demagnetization, and therefore it may happen that the data at that point disappears completely.
The consequences are the inability to load the game due to corrupted data, and if it is a compilation it is even worse, because given the inability to load a game it can become very difficult to understand where the next one is, and therefore mark its starting point, with obvious consequences also for the other subsequent games which, due to the mechanical limits of the box, must be manually identified.
This demagnetization does not always happen but it can happen, so be careful when buying cassettes that for years (or decades) have not been rewound but have the tape with the data exposed.
All this should therefore not be surprising that today usually modern peripherals with SD Card readers are used to retrogaming on computers like the Commodore 64, although the only way to try to relive the original experience is to always suffer using the originals. boxes...
