My ZX Spectrum was desparately temperamental about loading from cassette. When I bought The Hobbit game for it, it would fail right toward the end of loading. IIRC that took about 15 or 20 minutes (was it really that long?).Griff wrote:I dont think i ever saw a C64 disk drive, i only had that 'datasette' tape drive or what ever it was called - in it's later years i had to rest a heavy book on top of it when loading up a game, seemed to help it some how!
The cassette player was a really flash, multi-band, wide-stereo, 'casseiver' which I had bought after saving up my 5 weeks holiday pay working for the council in the summer.
At the 5th or 6th attempt at getting the game to load, and failing, I got angry and broke the radio cassette player.
It turned out my brother's very old, tired, battered portable tape player worked fine.
Just to add insult to injury, it only took me about 3½ hours to finish The Hobbit, including drawing up an entire map of the game. But when I took those hand-drawn maps into college the next day for others to copy, I was hailed as a hero.
I bet that truly was floppy... I still have a BBCB somewhere with the 51/4 floppy and an Atari ST with the 3.5.
