What did you prefer: cassettes or 5¼" floppies?

[Sephiroth81]

Hmm, I didn't think it was trolling. I just assumed everyone accepted that because the Spectrum was quickest at loading tapes without sacrificing reliability, and the coloured loading bars gave you a good indication of anything that was wrong. So are there people here in the know who think the C64 or the (gasp!) Atari 8 bit are better for tapes??

I was speaking in broader terms about the C64/Spectrum! Quicker, more reliable loading of tapes is certainly a positive, but I'd rather wait a bit longer for the deeper, more immersive, and more colourful and beautiful sounding C64 games!

EastEnders is the only good game for the Spectrum (ok, THAT is trolling).

[ivarf]

Did anything except cartridges beat the Amstrad CPC 6128 at speed for loading games?

[The Laird]

Did anything except cartridges beat the Amstrad CPC 6128 at speed for loading games?

Disk loading on the Atari computers is really fast, I think its been quoted as the fastest of all the 8-bits. I think this is due to the design where the disk drive has it's own processor and the high speed SIO connection (the predecessor to USB).

[Arnie]

Did anything except cartridges beat the Amstrad CPC 6128 at speed for loading games?

Disk loading on the Atari computers is really fast, I think its been quoted as the fastest of all the 8-bits. I think this is due to the design where the disk drive has it's own processor and the high speed SIO connection (the predecessor to USB).

Although I only have 4 or 5 disks I thought the Atari was quite average, I seem to remember the beeb being much faster that said it has been a long time since I've used one so could be wrong. I only have a BBC introduction disk and 5¼" drive taken from an Amiga 2000 bridge board set up that I acquired so not much to compare against.
Not had any experience with the 6128 but I'd say the drives in the Tatung Einstein are better as they don't have that horrid rubber band.

[Spector]

Slightly off topic and a bit vague maybe, but how long did it take to load a 512k Amiga game off the 3 inch disks?

[The Laird]

Did anything except cartridges beat the Amstrad CPC 6128 at speed for loading games?

Disk loading on the Atari computers is really fast, I think its been quoted as the fastest of all the 8-bits. I think this is due to the design where the disk drive has it's own processor and the high speed SIO connection (the predecessor to USB).

Although I only have 4 or 5 disks I thought the Atari was quite average, I seem to remember the beeb being much faster that said it has been a long time since I've used one so could be wrong. I only have a BBC introduction disk and 5¼" drive taken from an Amiga 2000 bridge board set up that I acquired so not much to compare against.
Not had any experience with the 6128 but I'd say the drives in the Tatung Einstein are better as they don't have that horrid rubber band.

Most BBC's have less memory than the Atari computers, so I suppose it also depends on what your loading too!

[ivarf]

Slightly off topic and a bit vague maybe, but how long did it take to load a 512k Amiga game off the 3 inch disks?

The Amiga was in practice way slower than the Amstrad CPC 6128 for loading games. Of course this has something to do with bigger games too

[ivarf]

Did anything except cartridges beat the Amstrad CPC 6128 at speed for loading games?

Not had any experience with the 6128 but I'd say the drives in the Tatung Einstein are better as they don't have that horrid rubber band.

I have always believed they used the same 3" Hitachi drive

[Matt_B]

Slightly off topic and a bit vague maybe, but how long did it take to load a 512k Amiga game off the 3 inch disks?

The Amiga was in practice way slower than the Amstrad CPC 6128 for loading games. Of course this has something to do with bigger games too

You're typically looking at around a minute to load an Amiga game from a single floppy. The data transfer speed is roughly the same, but the files are going to be much larger because the machine has that much more RAM to play with. Smaller games can load quickly though, and if you can find one that's only around 64K in size, it'll probably load as fast as an Amstrad game does.

Larger games that require disk swaps before you even start playing can take much longer though, and in the latter days of the Amiga 1200 it wasn't uncommon for a game to take up to five minutes before you could start playing it on account of all the loading, swapping, menus and introductory sequences that they'd go through. Most people I knew still using them at that point had bought hard drives though, and even by the mid-90s there was a veritable industry of hacking games over to them.

[NorthWay]

Slightly off topic and a bit vague maybe, but how long did it take to load a 512k Amiga game off the 3 inch disks?

How long is a piece of string? Yeah, it is one of those answers.
Depending on the overall design (like, was it intended to start fast) it could be away in 2-3 seconds. The physical transfer should be a maximum of 500Kbit/s, plus stepping and overlapping reads and/or setling/syncing time, giving you near as 25Kbyte/s if you are streaming, and with a good compression algorithm you should be able to real-time decompress data at near 50K/s (assuming you can get near 50% compression ratio).
So if the game doesn't insist on pulling in a huge animation or intro or theme music before you can press start, then you can get a lot of game into 100-200K. The never finished "10000 Leagues under the Sea" was quoted by the author that it was designed to be able to start in just 3(IIRC) seconds.

But most took a lot longer... and you might have had a cracked version with the intro to click through, and the trainer to click through, and then the decompression that was maxed out to make the file/disk as small as possible so it was complex and took its time.

[Arnie]

Did anything except cartridges beat the Amstrad CPC 6128 at speed for loading games?

Not had any experience with the 6128 but I'd say the drives in the Tatung Einstein are better as they don't have that horrid rubber band.

I have always believed they used the same 3" Hitachi drive

Nope, my Einstein has a Teac drive. The motor drives the disk directly as in 3.5" drives.

[SpecChum81]

What's the point of having 5 1/4 inches if its always floppy?

Cassettes for me, especially during the 80s.

I remember using Disks at lot a school and have very fond memories of both the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron, but I never used any at home until the early 90s.

Even now my some of fondest memories are of putting a cassette in to the tape deck, hearing those sounds and watching the Loading Screen!

[SJ_Sathanas]

My main memeoris of the cpc464 were the little rituals I felt necessary to make certain games load without crashing and the absolute revelation it was when I got a Master System and instant access carts!

[Antiriad2097]

My main memeoris of the cpc464 were the little rituals I felt necessary to make certain games load without crashing and the absolute revelation it was when I got a Master System and instant access carts!

Should have got an Atari, C64 or Spectrum, you could have experienced that much earlier. As always, Amstrad owners lose

[ivarf]

My main memeoris of the cpc464 were the little rituals I felt necessary to make certain games load without crashing and the absolute revelation it was when I got a Master System and instant access carts!

Several generation tapes copied from tape to tape? Or a faulty tape drive? What you are describing didn't happen on a CPC 464. With external tape drives on the disk-models it was more usual.