Loader Bollocks

Loading, even the word makes me feel tired. For gamers who like to play on old machines, loading is a facet of gaming which just hasn’t gone away. Some people even relish in it, bathing in the glorious high pitched babble of classic 8-bit cassettes. Like a golden fanfare of anticipation for the game to come.

There may be more power in my phone's sim card and more memory in a cotton bud... but these beauties were the mutt's nuts when I was a kid!

My first experience of loading was a bit of a shock. I’d previously played games on cartridges, or on TV games which didn’t have software at all. When I finally moved on from self typed ZX81 program listings, and invested in my first game cassette, I was in for a shock. Forget the satisfying noise and colour of a Spectrum classic, the ZX81 loads in silence, certainly the early games had no loading screens, or any way of knowing your tape was loading at all. That’s taking anticipation to a whole new level, a blank white screen, staring at the cassette deck as the tape gets towards the end. Will the game suddenly errupt onto the TV, or will you just get that click, as the play button pops up to signify the end of the tape. With my old battered Lloytron cassette deck, it was just as likely to be either.

The loading experience on the ZX Spectrum was something else entirely. You could hear every byte of code as it pumped its way into the machine. Red and blue borders for the headers, then the thirst quenching blue and yellow as the main code flowed through the cables. There were multi-coloured loading screens, which made quite a different loading sound to the game code itself. First there were those ticky bits while each pixel line was drawn onto the screen. Then the satisfying ‘Bluuuuurrrrrrr’ as the colour swept like a wave from the top of the picture to the bottom. If you had the loading volume wrong, then the colours appeared in the wrong places, a flashing psychedelic mish mash which usually ended in an ‘R Tape Loading Error’.

And yes, loading volume, two words which mean little these days, but would strike fear into the souls of 1980s Speccy fans. Enter hyperload, Turbo-load, Impossa-Load. These new loading styles were meant to speed up the loading process, but were really to help irradicate tape piracy. Some looked like normal loading methods, but instead of the familiar blue and yellow flashing border, a natty red and black, or green and blue. These loaded at a similar speed to normal tapes, but some games, (I hate you Bobby Bearing), seemed to have their code recorded onto the tape at double speed. The results were super high pitched loading speeds, often only audible to dogs. Your average school boy’s ‘market-bought’ cassette deck just wasn’t up to the job, and volume level became so hyper critical it would often be far more challenging to get a game to load, than it ever was to play. If the instructions said to type in ‘Load “” code’, rather than the normal, ‘Load “” , you knew you were in trouble.

See that's the problem... the volume level should have been set to 7.8 instead of 7.7 and it would have worked first time. Honest.

Move the crackly volume control to roughly 7.5 on the dial, start the tape, almost got to the loading screen, adjust to 8, got to the loading screen but crashed half way through. Go to 8.5, got nowhere near the loading screen. Delicately nudge it down to around 8.2 on the dial, got to the very beginning of the loading screen, then stopped. Ok, now try just under 8, this time it gets to loading screen, colours in the loading screen, but uh oh, colours all wrong and crash! Try something different, chuck it a 6. Doesn’t get to the loading screen. Review situation, try delicate finger nail adjustment to 7.7. Loading ok, gets to loading screen, colours it in – correctly. Feeling confident, dare to look away from the screen for almost three seconds. Still loading, dare to stand up and stretch. Still loading, but tape getting near the end.

SILENCE. Sound has stopped coming from the tape, but the border is still flashing, it’s still waiting for more code. Time for anxious staring at the tape deck, not much tape left to run. The delay seems like a decade, then Brrrrrrrr.Bip, Brrrrrrr,Bibablibablib. Screen goes black, 1982 Sinclair Research… Grrrrr. Time to try it all again using the other side of the tape.

Of course, us Spectrum fans at least had some control over the loading, the Commodore 64 offered a whole new wonderland of tape based fun. Firstly, they had no volume control, which generally meant games were even less likely to load. What they did have though, was loading music. For many, Imagine’s Hyper Sports was their first experience of loading music. Suddenly loading didn’t seem so tedious, the music not only giving you something to listen to, but also giving you firm belief that something was actually loading. Some games even had their best music for loading, most notable is Rob Hubbard’s amazing Sanxion theme, far better than the actual in-game music, you could only hear it in its entirety if you turned the tape off and stopped it loading the game. Towards the end of the C64’s 8-bit supremacy, you could play with the music as a game loaded, or even play a simple mini-game while you waited for the real game to load.

Don’t get carried away though, the C64 was a nightmare to load from too. Enter the Azimuth alignment kit, basically a cassette, screwdriver and cut-out cardboard arrow (!) to enable you to fiddle around moving the head around inside the tape deck. Then there were the loading times, until the mid-1980s, most C64 loading was in silence, so you never knew whether the game was loading or not. Thanks to the slow player and huge (at the time) 64k memory, some games took over ten minutes to load. One of my favourite C64 games, Software Star, actually took thirteen minutes to load. When I was a teenager, that was enough time to read a comic, eat your lunch and have a poo. Once you’ve waited that long to load something, there’s also a great reluctance to turn it off. I’d leave my C64 on for days on end, just to prevent having to load a game again.

FINALLY! A home computer that came with its own dedicated cassette deck! It DOES work well... right?

Eventually though, while on the surface C64 loading got sophisticated, the benefits were limited. Tape counters which counted upwards would just continue rising well after the tape deck had stopped itself. Descending tape counters would click back round to 999 once they got to zero. Worst were the games which had a counter which would get to zero, then the screen would go black. Those wise enough not to reset and start again, would find out that the game actually had lots more loading to do, but this time in silence without a counter.

It’s probably something to do with the placid nature of the British that we perservered with cassette loading for so long. In the USA and Germany, they quickly moved over to Disc based formats. Indeed, Commodore stated that the American public wouldn’t put up with loading from cassette, i’m not sure if that meant they thought we Brits were stupid, or just more patient.

In contrast to days gone by, the 3.5” disc loading times on mainstream 16-bit formats, Amiga and Atari ST, were a breath of fresh air. However, it didn’t take long for games to outgrow the format, and loading to seem like an issue all over again. The popularity of adventure gaming meant that soon we had 15 and 16 disc graphic feasts from the likes of Sierra, Delphine and Lucasarts. Disc swapping became a chore written about in magazines. Pushed to the back of many 16-bit gamers memory is the blood curdling terror you experienced when after twenty hours of play, it turned out that Disc 9 of your ‘legendary dungeon quest’ had a read error. The pain ran so deep, it meant that even if you got the faulty disc replaced, you’d never return to the game again.

I may build a shrine to the N64... and if the kitchen has to go to make room then, so be it. We can eat out a lot.

Perhaps this long history of waiting means i’m less tolerant of loading inadequacy than I ever was before. These days we have to wait for PS3 games to download updates, load, then install, then restart! This series of delays often tops even those lengthy Commodore 64 tapes. Loading is possibly also the primary reason why I herald the N64 as the greatest console of all time. This last great cartridge based console still mesmerises with its instant rush of great gaming.

In conclusion though, loading wasn’t just a vital part of the fabric of 8-bit gaming, but a fascinating experience in itself. Often stressful, it was also exciting, just watching that tape wirring around in its player. It is that link between sound and a videogame that I still find beguilling. Early 1980s Pop stars were releasing games on the B-side of their singles; radio stations were broadcasting software at 1am in the morning! I always wondered if I connected a microphone to the ‘ear’ socket of my Spectrum, could I actually sing it a game? Could I hum a loading screen? I guess there’s only one way to find out…




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10 Comments

  1. Richie Rich PEOWW says:

    Tremendous article!

    In some ways I miss the epic loading times as after 8 mins of loading a game you wouldn’t just switch it off after a few minutes of playing. Games seemed less disposable then.

    The best loader for me was on Moonstrike as during the loading it cleverly gave you the backstory of the game in comic-book style images. Joe Blade 3 allowed you to play Pac-Man during the loading which was amazing (and more fun than all of the Joe Blade games combined).

    Then of course there were the awesome, and completely misleading, loading screens. These were true works of art. I remember with fondness the great screen for Kung Fu Master. If only they got that guy to do the in-game graphics.

    Then there was the Alcatraz loading system which drew the loading screen in clever sequences rather than top to bottom.

    These days I do my gaming on the 360 and while things are faster, we still have loading screens. They aren’t the clever interpretations of the game’s cover art anymore but rather a sequence of screens showing you the logos for the dev team, publisher, middleware supplier and basically anyone else who had a hand in it.

    Usually unskippable.

    ARGH!

  2. Adam says:

    Wow, I missed out on the Tape Deck Era by a few years but that was a great read.

    I love the conclusion; to think that for all the advancements, with the PS3 most Gamers are still enduring the same

  3. Mark R MarkuzR says:

    Thankfully, I bypassed the Spectrum completely with my Oric 48k so I never had such issues with loading… a simple din plug into the machine and another into the tape deck and that was it… no volume controls to mess around with (it was a direct output, after all) and no screwing around with rewinding and trying again. Two options existed…

    CLOAD “Hopper”

    or

    CLOAD “Hopper”, s

    One would load in regular speed (940 baud as I recall) and the other would be high speed (2800 I think) so one would sound like an odd trim-phone ringtone and the other would sound like a Spectrum loading. Either way, it was first time every time… and I loved it. Just one more reason that I love the Oric over any other machine of that era (that I owned, anyway).

    There was one game in particular, Lone Raider from Severn Software, actually had synthesised music playing and a little animation while the game loaded… presumably down to it having a dedicated sound chip… and that really blew me away. The five minute wait for the game to load seemed worth it, knowing that they’d gone to such lengths to make the time pass quicker.

    I have to disagree with Blucey on the 360 loading screens though… the initial loading screens tend to be so quick, it doesn’t really matter. Oblivion had the Bethesda logo up in a matter of seconds, and clicking start would bring up the familiar map scene where you proceed into the game. Same with pretty much every game I’ve played on the 360 – there haven’t been any load lengths worth mentioning. Certainly WITHIN the games there have been more lengthy loading screens, but usually accompanied with some hints on gameplay… which I find invaluable since I never RTFM :D

    Good to have you back Jace, it’s been too long :)

  4. Ben Ben says:

    I hate loading times, but the thing I hate more is frequent loading times, even if it’s not that long a wait having the game interrupted so often is just something that really grinds my gears.

    Great read :)

  5. Samuel The Preacher says:

    I started out with floppy disks on an Atari ST, and I recall thinking that the four to five minute loads were a form of torment, a la Tantalus, because you had an equal chance at the end of that five minutes of playing or discovering the floppy was corrupt. I didn’t encounter tape loading until college, we had an old cassette deck in the IT labs, and by this point the world had moved onto CDs, so it seemed to take an eternity to load anything when we tried to play around with it.

    We didn’t have a CD-R for a while when I first started at college, and it was pre-USB flash drives, so I can recall splitting the demo of Unreal Tournament in 1998 onto floppy disks, in an attempt to take it home, where we only had dial-up at the time. It took something like 85 floppy disks, and every time I tried it, one of the sequence, usually in the late 30s to 40s would be corrupt, forcing me to try again the next day. I eventually got it home, after about 3 weeks and a couple of hundred floppy disks. That was a very small demo by today’s standards. Scary thought. Also goes to show just how stubborn I am. I think I actually bought the full game just a month or so later anyway, after all that hassle.

    These days, if something takes more than 3 seconds to load, I start to lose patience with it. I only play 360 games that are installed to the hard drive as a result. We’ve come a long way.

  6. Rook says:

    I never owned the spectrum but a friend of mine did, and I never knew anything about load volumes. I was always amazed though that you could copy a game by playing it on one tape deck and recording the sound on another, that was crazy.

    The Commodore was my computer, first the C16 and then the C64 eventually getting an Amiga. There were many times I tried loading a game and using a tiny screwdriver to adjust the height of the read head and try loading again and again and again. Then there were the tape readers that came with the knob on top for adjusting the read head, which always came loose after a while. The day I got my disk drive was a joy, add in an Action Replay cartridge and I was loading games from tape, saving them to disk, and then playing them that way from then on. 8 seconds to load a game from disk, I was in nirvana… until I became spolied by it and then 8 seconds became too long. :D

  7. Lorna Lorna says:

    Fantastic piece. I remember tape loading all too well, using my dad’s battered black tape deck. It is strange how little time they probably actually took, but back then, it semed like a lifetime. I used to love the loading screen graphics and totally agree with Rich how gutting it was when the game looked nothing like them. I remember sacrificing my game load on many occasions by interrupting it to print the pretty screen out onto the old till-rollesque printer that my dad had for the Speccy.

    The day that I got the ZX Spectrum +2 with the built in tape deck was certainly one of relief. At least the games were always loaded in in those days though, unlike some games now…as Ben says, the curse of frequent load screens can be infuriating. Effort from games like Oblivion to make them interesting is at least something and there is always an interesting nugget of advice or random info on a town or history to be found on them.

    I think that having to wait for games to load back then has made me a little more patient, unless the loading happens mid way through play…Mirror’s Edge, as much as I fucking love the game is bad for this. For a game that is supposed to be free-flowing, having an area load in mid-way throgh a race for your life, thus throwing you off and ruining your hard earned momentum is hair-tearing…it is certainly enough to cost you split seconds crucial in a speed run.

  8. Adam says:

    All I can say it that was a fantastic read and so-so true..!!
    I had a Spectrum for more years than was probably legal, but as the loading screen$ got better, counters being added and any other update the programmers of the day wished to chuck into the mix, it really was a desirable past time.

  9. Stromasher says:

    Thankfully the C64 had the mighty SID chip and would quite often play a tune while the game loaded. Sometimes the loading tunes outshone the game proper. Anyone else remember just loading a game for the loading tune?
    Games like Rambo and the 5 Ocean loaders (which was your favorite version?) where absolutely stunning.

    Then you’ve got Invade-a-load and other “play a game whilst your game loads” turbo loaders.

    Thankfully in 85 (ish) I got a disk drive, but would still load some games by tape just to hear those tunes and see the loading artwork. Interesting times whatever way you look at it.

  10. Mark R Mark R says:

    YES! I used to love loading up Lone Raider (Severn Software) on the Oric, as it had this awesome tune which played while it was loading in. Not sure the tech behind it, but if you were to pause the cassette player it would actually pause the music. I never could get my head around it. Even now, some thirty years later, I still can’t. It was a great game too, but it was definitely the musical loading screen that caught my attention.

    I want to get my Oric out of the cupboard now!

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