[akuthia]

Forgive my youngess, my best floppy memories are from writing bootdisks for individual games to improve performance for that game

[rabb1t]

Oooh I remember doing that for a couple of games, heh.

[Giftmacher]

Wing Commander Privateer and Strike commander both needed 600K of conventional memory to run IIRC. Definitely boot disk material.

Gift.

[Fozzik]

I remember loading up a cassette tape to play Decathlon on the Commodore 64. It only took like 20 minutes, and I think you might have had to flip the tape in the middle of loading.

[akuthia]

Originally Posted by Fozzik

I remember loading up a cassette tape to play Decathlon on the Commodore 64. It only took like 20 minutes, and I think you might have had to flip the tape in the middle of loading.

i'm sorry Foz, but i dont think your geekness of flipping cassettes equals the geekness of WRITING config.ini and boot.ini files, by hand, for EACH game that wouldnt run in windows 3.1 because of the way it handled memory

[Giftmacher]

Aww man, cassette tapes, now that is going back. I remember my favourite game ever, Elite, was on tape... took ages to load and you could forget about saving. If only I'd got the disk version! Years later I revelled in the glory that was Elite Plus, a game that not only loaded instantly it also had the reasonable prospect of saving a game in under and hour.

Also wrote configs etc. they are more geek than tapes but tapes are OLD and therefore worthy of respect

Last but not least, did anyone else own a BBCmicro and hanker after a sideways ROM/RAM board?

Gift.

[Tomcrit]

Gift as you had a BBC micro areyou in the UK. If so did you see David Braben (wrote Elete) on TV the other night called "Brits Who made the modern world" on channel 5. It was how they programmed what at the time was the 1st 3d game. If you missed keep an eye for the repeats.

They were talking about cramming the program into 22k it brought back some memories for me. I remember working hours and hours to squeeze an extra dozen bytes of ram out of a Commodore 64. The finished game i produced had 4 bytes spare ram, we had to program down to individual bits ie for data flags etc. And that game was sold on tape didn't you love to listen to all the noise and you could even tell from the sound if the game was actually going to load.

[Giftmacher]

Damn, I missed that show but I'll keep an eye open for a repeat. As for listening to tapes loading... I never could figure out why we were treated to the noise they make. Perhaps it was to let you know whether the damn things would run.

Now I think about it, although more recently, why did modems let you listen to their grable and screech too?

Gift.

[Renekal]

about half of the modem I ever had would let you turn the speaker off, best feature ever.