The masters of Commodore 64 games
spillhistorie.no109 points by Retrogamingpap 4 months ago
109 points by Retrogamingpap 4 months ago
Clarification siince the author does not mention this specifically: Disk drives dominated the C64 storage market in the US, Canada, and Germany, while cassette dominated the UK and elsewhere. Thus, US Gold had to convert US disk games to cassette for the UK market; I presume that the rushed jobs the article mentions were for especially popular games, or when there was an unusually short contractual deadline for delivery. Given how slow the native Commodore disk drive is, one can imagine how much more painful loading a designed-for-disk game from cassette. Games were often abridged to fit.
That said, this meant that slow disk transfer was not a handicap for C64 in the UK. Since tape was the medium of choice for ZX Spectrum and other rivals, C64 was on a level playing field. If anything C64 still had the advantage, because the Commodore Datasette is a digital format and very reliable, while Spectrum and US rivals like Apple and TRS-80 use analog formats and are incredibly unreliable that made people cry, groan, moan, and curse. Apple II's tape storage is also analog, but Disk II caused the Apple market to very soon move to disk-only (and Disk II is perhaps the greatest of Woz's many late-1970s engineering triumphs) so it didn't matter.
Three things I am unclear on:
* The extent of the above-mentioned abridgement process. My understanding is that both cosmetic things like loading screens, and sometimes entire portions like (say) a couple of the sports in the Epyx Games series, were removed. I don't know if there is a compendium of the abridgements; I don't see the information at Lemon64, but perhaps I missed it.
* Why software crackers had to crack cassette games in the first place, given that they can be duplicated with any dual-bay tape deck. Was there a reason other than to say they could do it (see next point), and perhaps to allow for cheating?
* The extent of crack intros for cassette games. In the US, crackers (then and now) put small animations before loading to announce themselves send greetings to friends and rivals. I'm sure this happened in the UK but the medium no doubt restricted the intros' size.
> Since tape was the medium of choice for ZX Spectrum and other rivals, C64 was on a level playing field.
Kinda. While the C64 had its own cassette player - the C64 was very slow to load stuff compared to the others, until fast load came along.
Part of the reason behind this was that by default the C64 actually loaded the data twice during the process of loading from tape — once to actually read the data, then it read a second copy to verify the data.
> Why software crackers had to crack cassette games in the first place, given that they can be duplicated with any dual-bay tape deck.
It was actually quite rare to duplicate games with twin-tape systems — at least amongst all the folk I knew. It was easier to load a cracked game into memory, using some fast loader (or indeed: from disk), then write it out again.
> The extent of crack intros for cassette games.
I recall that lot of cracked games showed an intro once loaded - the intro was often added onto the game, and often the tape and disk versions did this the same way (as opposed to a separately loaded program). This was part of the reason why folk were trying to write such small intros.
I think cracking had at least two reasons.
1. There was a lot of exotic copy protection going on, especially on disk. Putting data in sectors that could not be written by the standard disk copying methods was just the beginning. I don’t know if any copy protection of tapes was ever effective but I wouldn’t be surprised.
2. To enable the use of “turbo” loaders. Cassette games were released on standard cassettes that were maybe shorter than normal. But if you compressed the games using better algorithms, you could fit up to 20 games on one side of a standard audio cassette. Normally the turbo loader was placed first on the cassette. It would maybe take a minute or two to load. Then, the rest of the pirated games followed. You’d write down the index number of each game on the cassette cover so you could fast-forward to it. The reason this was called “turbo” was presumably because as the game took up less space on the tape, you didn’t have to wait as long for it to roll past the read head. The c64 could decompress the data faster than the Datasette could play it back, so there was no processing wait. Most likely even a game that could be copied straight over to another cassette, still had copy protection that prevented it from loading using a different loader than it was mastered for. Hence it needed to be cracked.
> The c64 could decompress the data faster than the Datasette could play it back, so there was no processing wait.
C64 fast loaders generally didn't use any compression whatsoever.
They would cut the load time in half by simply only writing/reading the file once (whereas normally the load process actually read the data twice) - and then get extra a whole heap of extra speed on top of that (turbo speed!), by implementing the load in custom code, basically working at a faster baud rate than the standard C64 kernel code did.
My memory is grey, my eyes are bent, my back is dim ...
My C64 now sports a USB interface and a vast amount of storage. Dad bought it from the NAAFI in Rheindahlen. It came with a "datasette" and also had a cartridge slot, which you seem to have forgotten about.
Carts loaded in a few seconds, games on tape took 5-15 minutes. I cannot remember the price disparity between games on cartridge and tape but it must have been significant.
A few years later we bagged a floppy drive and whilst quick, it was huge. The lead time to load being 3s or 15m is almost immaterial in a two hour session. You pop in the tape, tell the machine to load and go off and grab a drink or whatever.
You note issues with Speccies but it was widely known at the time that you copied to chromium tapes instead of iron if you wanted a game to last. I think model names were C90 and D90 for 90 minutes tapes with those technologies. You never used double speed recording mode with games either.
When me and my brother returned home to West Germany from school in the UK, Dad carefully plugged the power lead into the video out. The next school hols we got to play on the now repaired unit ... and over 40 years later, I still have it.
I remember getting a copy of SubLogic Flight Simulator II on a cassette. It was a longer tape than a 90m standard cassette and it was 2 sided. Loading times were crazy on that!
(Eastern EU context) Cracked games came with speed loader "built in", they weren't bad to load, but we did have to fine tune the head position on the C64 too (often per game)!
Floppy drives weren't really accessible for a long time (they were more expensive than the computers, which you were lucky to have at all).
"Disk drives dominated the C64 storage market in the US, Canada, and Germany, while cassette dominated the UK and elsewhere."
I can only speak for Germany and my bubble, but we definitely had more datasettes than 1541s.
Amstrad CPC owner here.
We had a similar issue. Disk games were available but not as much as cassette games.
Many cassette games were cracked and made into disk games, often with cheats available too.
Is the Amstrad cassette format digital or analog? Put another way, did you cry, groan, moan, and curse at failed loads as much as your Spectrum friends?
Probably analog because Alan Sugar so it was built on the cheap, but it was also an integrated cassette drive so I didn't get the full experience of having to worry about volume controls.
I also got a floppy drive (3 inch, instead of 5 1/4 or 3 1/2 inch again because Alan Sugar) after 12 months and it was a game changer in terms of productivity, but most of the games were still on cassette.
Spelunker, M.U.L.E, Seven Cities of Gold, Up N Down, Moon Patrol, Raid on Bungeling Bay, Blue Max
I could go on and on...
M.U.L.E., Bungeling Bay, Mission Impossible, Racing Destruction Set and Ultima IV were our go-tos.
Oh this bring back memories. As during communist era, there were no extra money or even stores where to buy. So we copied casettes. First load game then save on blank cassete. This worked for almost all games, but one. That one instead of waiting for run or save command, started game immediately. So only way to copy was using double decker. But most of double deckers were shitty. Adding so much noise, that copy didn’t work. I remember visiting one friend that has high quality deck, that was able to make a workable copy.
The part about the "copy protection" schemes was sad/amusing. So much work put into cracking and anti-cracking, and even cracking for the purpose of legitimate distribution, and wasting memory on profanity-soaked rants to the hackers... Everyone involved in the story looks back at it as "fun" and "challenging" but all I see is wasted time on everyone's part and software that is more difficult to use. Here we are, 40 years later, and DRM is still with us and they're still hopelessly trying.
They "worked" in the sense that, when I managed to save up for a game on my minimum-wage salary, I bought a game that none of my friends had a cracked copy of. I remember buying EA's Caveman Ughlympics for that reason (it also came with some cool extras in the box).
But it didn't work in the sense of making me buy more games. I had hundreds of copied games and a couple dozen purchased ones, and if copy protection had been perfect, I would have had a couple dozen. The publishers always acted like I would have purchased the hundreds, which was impossible.
So it was really a competition between the publishers to out-protect the others more than between the publishers and the customers.
The C64 protection methods that drove me most up the wall were V-MAX! and Rapidlok, especially since V-MAX! existed in several different variations. Man, those were a pain. Harald Seeley (Alien Technology Group, who developed V-MAX! and WarpSpeed, and did a number of ports for companies like Cinemaware, was in my hometown of San Diego) eventually explained a lot of the tricks later on. Some good discussion here https://diskpreservation.rittwage.com/?pg=vmax and here https://diskpreservation.rittwage.com/dp.php?pg=rapidlok .
I used to sell small business apps on floppy drives. For copy protection, one of the best tricks was to physically damage a sector and try to format it.
You take a floppy disk, use a pin to make a hole on the magnetic medium at a random place, then format the disk so that sector is marked as a "bad sector". You hardcode the sector ID in your app, then when your app runs, you try low-level formatting that sector. If it can be formatted, it's a pirate copy.
Floppy disks had physical read-only mode, so my app asked users to put their disks in read-write mode to work :)
I suggest you read this page about the Dungeon Master ('87) copy protection which includes an interview with its main programmer and author of its (ingenious) copy protection.
http://dmweb.free.fr/community/documentation/copy-protection...
Nearly 40 years later, I still wouldn't call it "wasted time".
Paperclip 64 came with a physical dongle that you plugged into a joystick port. If the dongle wasn’t present, the software wouldn’t run.
The software itself was impressive, a full-featured word processor with an 80 column display.
especially in the time of 0-day warez. Interestingly, many thrived on the ShareWare business models (including John Carmack IIRC)
For anyone else feeling a good hit of nostalgia, I highly recommend this excellent site with C64 games playable in the browser - and with netplay too! https://c64.krissz.hu/online-playable-games/
I often wonder about nostalgia related to computers/computing. It's strange because, even though I spent countless hours on my Commodore 64 as a teenager, and it had a major influence on my life (it basically introduced me to programming and set the course for my professional life), I just don't feel the nostalgia vibes.
I got my hands on an old C64 a few years ago and fired it up. I tinkered with it for about 10 minutes and lost interest. It just felt lame, a complete waste of time. It was surprising to me, considering how important the C64 has been in my life. Also, I feel that way about pretty much all old computer/computing devices. I've got an old laptops, iPods, iPhones, and even the original Rio PMP300 mp3 player, but I don't really feel any real nostalgia or love for them. It's like they were just tools I used, like a hammer or screwdriver, and that's it.
Contrast that with my love of older cars. I love finding old cars on Craigslist, taking them home and tinkering with them, restoring them. It makes me feel like I'm cool, driving a mid-80s Honda CRX or something similar. I have no idea why that is; I was never a "car guy" until I got older. But, like I said, I often wonder why I have nostalgia vibes for one old thing (cars), but not another (computers), especially when one has had a much greater impact on my life.
I wonder if it's society - that is, American culture has always had a major boner for cars and I'm being influenced by that. Or, maybe it's because "computers" have been my profession for the last 30 years, and that has killed my love for them. Not sure.
BTW, no disrespect to those who do get nostalgia vibes for the C64 an other older devices. Just the opposite - much respect.
> I got my hands on an old C64 a few years ago and fired it up. I tinkered with it for about 10 minutes and lost interest. It just felt lame, a complete waste of time. (...) Contrast that with my love of older cars. I love finding old cars on Craigslist, taking them home and tinkering with them, restoring them.
Perhaps the reason has to do with your approach. You're not going to have a chance to get hooked on the C=64 if your interest is in tinkering and restoring. That's barely enough time to load up a piece of software and refamiliarize yourself with it, never mind experience it in a new way. In contrast to your cars, it sounds like you spent enough time with them that you were experiencing them in a new way.
My apologies if that sounds a bit harsh. In some ways I am similar. Even though I am fascinated by old technology, I never could get into old computers the way most people seem to get into them (e.g. by playing games from their childhood).
Yeah, my interest in vintage systems - the C64 particularly, but even old Macs, old minis, etc. - isn't games either (though candidly it wasn't my interest really back in the day as well). It's the challenge of making it do things that are interesting by modern standards. It's Turing-complete, so anything should be possible ... ;)
A while back I started writing an assembly language sha256 algorithm for the C128. It's basically a lot of adds and bitwise operations on 32-bit values, which gets really tedious when you have to do them 8 bits at a time, carrying/shifting through a set of 4 bytes. I should finish it to find out how many hours it takes to process a decent-sized file.
The great thing about old cars is that you can fix them up pretty much yourself, while a modern car has all kinds of software driven behaviour that is really hard to touch as a non-professional mechanic.
A Commodore 64 or PDP-11 is the equivalent of that. There's 64Kb of RAM and I can understand every byte that is there, what it does, and how it ties into the hardware. When I look at most C64 games, I understand exactly how it's made. I can also do the same things myself.
You might have the full Linux kernel code, but do you really understand completely how it works?
No problem, probably your expectations changed to the point your childhood computer is no longer interesting. As a child you were expecting discovery and wonder, and probably receiving it consistently. And that sense of wonder and discovery continues with cars.
For some reason I share that view. Maybe it is since computers got so much better?
I got way more nostalgia for NES, which I still think is fun to play and play with my kids. Super Mario still feels good while C64 games feel clunky.
I've noticed with "retro"-looking games like Stardew Valley, people will say they look like 80s games. No, they look like 90s games (at worst). People forget how primitive the graphics were at 320x200x16. They were great at the time, and people did some ingenious stuff to get the most out of those systems, but they couldn't display anything like what's called retro today.
Ye it is a strange genre. Stardew Valley seems to have way better graphics than say Jack Jazz Rabbit and Red Alert.
Also many retro looking games adds pixel effects that weren't there on crt:s. Games of that era were quite smooth looking.
I just don't feel the nostalgia vibes.
I half agree with you.
I don't feel nostalgia when i see yet another emulator. I've tried all of them.
But when i get a chance to put my hands on the real thing, it all comes flooding back.
Same thing with me. I grew up with an Apple // and was absolutely obsessed with it. Bought one during covid and was bored with it immediately. Not the same with my NES though. Idk why. Too primitive I guess.
Wow. First time I've seen one of my old games in decades. Miner 2049'er sure looks like a game of the same name I wrote back in '82, age 17. Sold quite a few copies thru Sears & KMart in the US, distributors in UK sold a bunch more. Paid for a bunch of mid-80's parties.
Miner 2049'er was up there with Hard Hat Mack and Donkey Kong. Maddening but great in that the stages had completely different mechanics, Miner was unforgiving in some ways but loose in others, felt like a precursor to Montezuma's Revenge. Thanks for the fun!
Turns out, that was not my game. Mine was "Miner 2049er" without the apostrophe, and it was more like Activision's Pitfall. Very similar graphics, surprisingly.
Always was impressed by games developers who became millionaires back then.
i only tried playing one game, but the CRT effect was interesting. There's a bit of bending from a very round screen. The noise effect was also something that wasn't what I was expecting. At least they didn't try to over do it with scan lines
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PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
At first I only had a tape drive. But I was later given a 1541 disk drive. I thought life couldn't get any better than a single floppy disk drive. LOL
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