Mr Dave wrote:
chinnyhill10 wrote:
Remember when you were a kid and your mate bought his C64 to your house or you took your Amstrad to his? And everything worked easily?
No. I remember things being equally as awkward. Pieces of paper stuffed in the tape deck, faffing around with said tape decks level, twiddling the tape jack to get a decent connection, disks that would corrupt if you as much as sneezed near them, games that would ねえd to be returned to the shops not once, not twice, not even three times but four times to get a copy which worked (and that on the fourth copy, when loading, you could choose whether to have working music and glitched graphics or perfect graphics and no music by holding down the J key or not. How we discovered this, I have no idea.)
And something tells me, based on my experiences of the multiface and its ilk, that if you could somehow connect a spectrum wirelessly to the internet it would most certainly not work easily.
Not my experience at all, barring the returning tape games to the shop. And I never had a CPC or Amiga disc fail on me until the CPC discs were so old it would be expected (i.e 10 years +). Had a copy of Hard Drivin on tape though that shed its oxide from one section in a great big chunk!
At my peak I had 450+ titles on CPC. Spectrum, C64 and Amiga. All original media.
Reliable tape loading on the Speccy and CPC became very easy once you knew how. C64 was much harder and involved voodoo. In later years returning a tape became quite rare unless the game was shit and you just wanted to change it.
If you treat your media and equipment like shit then yes it will fail. It was always the kids at school who claimed they had to do things like "hold the tape deck down" that ended up with games that never loaded because holding the tape deck down ended up fucking up the alignment. Call me a geek but even at the age of 10 I could work that one out! Also go to Tandy and get a proper non abrasive head cleaner to use every 6 months!
I have a whole raft of 8 and 16 bits behind me that run just fine. Oddly, many of which are interfaced to modern equipment without fuss. It's only my poor old BBC Master keyboard that struggles sometimes due to the abuse it suffered during 7 years in a classroom.