Why Loading Bars on 80s Micros? [Byte Size] | Nostalgia Nerd
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 มิ.ย. 2016
- Loading Screens, and loading bars; it's a question which plagued my mind for many years. Why, when loading games from audio tape or cassette software do many home computers display horizontal raster bars on screen in varying colours? Why don't we have a picture of a little guy landing on the moon? WHY DO WE HAVE LOADING BANDS? Bars? Rasters? Lines? Loading Lines??! Whatever you want to call them? Well, in this episode of Byte Size, I'll be finding out why. Popular machines like the Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC all featured these bands in one form or another. Even early machines like the ZX81 featured something similar (although this was a design quirk more than intentional), but it's something I find particularly fascinating none the less, and after all, what's Byte Size about if it isn't unearthing knowledge from old technology quirks. Grab your WH Smith cassette deck, a copy of Jet Set Willy and join me.
Featured in this video are;
Spectrum Loading Screens
C64 Loading Screens
Amstrad CPC Loading Screens
BBC Micro Loading Screens
It's a loading screen bonanza.
BG Music is Feandra by SnowKitten, available on the Miresa album at snowkitten.bandcamp.com/album...
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Wow, my 32 years question without a proper answer has finished. THANKS!!!!
I'm not a tech guy dude. That's why this was perfect for me.
Sergey Zykov too busy building my own space shuttle, sry
Back in the day I did that the lazy way using the book 'The complete ROM disassembly" which I was able to borrow from my local library.
Found the pages with loading routine and typed it into my assember and as far I remember it worked without too much jiggery pokery .
Actually used quite a lot of the ROM routines when first started learning Z80 then developing my own 'routines.
@@Dargonhuman Mee too. Your wife's very accommodating.
@@nytrex2001 No dude, that was me in drag.
And you still owe me $50 for doing that thing with my tongue.
As bright kids that we were, me and my little brother, after we got our magic Speccy, we quickly realized that the sound signal encoded the games. So we came to the idea that we could create some more wonderful games of our own, just by mimicking these weird sounds by own our voices and recording them on tape...
After a couple of busy evenings, we called our project off. Somehow we didn't make it past the cyan-red bars step. If we had only tried harder, we would have been the next Jobs and Woz by today. I will never stop regretting this missed life-time opportunity!
Start load..
Make cup of tea...
Come back to crash....
My early computer life.
Still apparently mine...
Falconhoof
It was making the cup of tea that did it..
Switch kettle on power fluctuates, computer melts down.
TheLinkoln18 I actually believe that! it happened too much to not e science!
Falconhoof
It was either that or the static generated as you walked across the carpet.. xd.
Now this is the TRULY CHARM of old 80s micros. Just make a couple of cups more because when you got azimuth issues, games wont load first try !!!!. The old times !!!!.
I will still never know just how many hours of my childhood were spent watching these bars flash and waiting for the game to load in though.
Cool, used to hate waiting for the cassette load times but they had their own charm building anticipation. :)
Yes and now it's an essential part of the authentic retro experience! One abiding memory I have of the C64 is hearing the Star-Spangled Banner loading music on U.S. Gold games.
Nice explanation, I just thought they meant the game system was excited to be played.
I should have just made a video and said that XD
Retro Game Players getting wet with anticipation :))
Loading pictures were funny when you think about it. When they're loading the pictures, they're not loading the game. :D
In the case of... I think it was the Amstrad, it needed something like 8 passes as it'd do one line per group of 8 so you'd see the screen build up like a blinds effect. If this took 20-30 seconds, that's 30 seconds of not loading the actual damn game.
The Spectrum did this. This was because if you wanted to move (one byte) to the right, you could increment the low byte of the screen address and if you wanted to move one pixel down, you could increment the high byte of the address. This worked well if you wanted to consider the screen as a bunch of 8x8 blocks but quickly became a pain otherwise.
Chaos Corner i think you're confused. The spectrum used a pixel mapped screen for dots and a character mapped area for attributes. It had no hardware scrolling - if you want to shift the screen one column left/right or row up/down you have to physically shift the dot bytes and possibly the attribute bytes; unless moving in character blocks you could end up with pixels changing colour as they shifted from one character position to another a the attributes were different.
The BBC micro used a 6845 CRT controller which allowed hardware scrolling by shifting the start position of the screen (within a block of memory). this method is extremely fast. Also the BBC used a pixel map to colour palette which meant the colour of each pixel was stored as the pixel, using 1, 2 or 4 bits for each pixel.
The byte order mapping on the BBC was odd in that bytes of sequential memory were stacked vertically as a character before moving right one character across a row - this allowed characters to be put on the screen very fast in character positions whenever the screen started on a character boundary. it was possible to configure (tell the hardware) how many bytes were in a character position.
The different modes were achieved by different configurations; Elite even changed the config part way down the screen to give a high res action display with less colours that the low res instruments display at the bottom.
Cig, definitely not confused. Possibly we're just talking at cross-purposes. I'm not talking about scrolling but if you want to write a character to the screen, you can write it as a series of 8 bytes, incrementing H. If you wanted to move to the right, increment L. It gets a bit messy after that.
Trust me, I know what I'm talking about but I may not be communicating it well.
Some good discussion in the comments here whatnotandgobbleaduke.blogspot.com/2011/07/zx-spectrum-screen-memory-layout.html
Chaos Corner sorry, you're right...now I've reread what you said I understand what you were talking about. That'll learn me to reply after a 31+ hour overnight journey with little sleep - I had read a comment about loading ZX81 software and heard that the BBC didn't indicate that it was loading whereas it did and had that on my brain and saw something about going down/right on a screen with reference to increasing addresses and my first thought was hard ware scrolling.
using that addressing for a character block allows pixel maps to be shifted fairly fast from font definition to screen.
No problem. It's a bit complex and tricky to explain without diagrams. I seem to recall there was some way to make the BBC indicate some progress on loading but I may just be thinking of the Acorn Atom (I had an Atom but not a BBC. Didn't use it anywhere near like I did the Sinclairs).
I used to enjoy listening to the loading sound on the ZX Spectrum. I was actually able to tell what kind of data was loading just by listening to it and could also tell when the loading was nearly complete. Much like in The Matrix, where they can tell what's going on just by looking at the code!
Rasta bars mon. I and I be jammin' when I load up dis game, seen?
Icon of Sin im too high for this.
Was just thinking that Rasta bars sound like places in Jamaica that serve drinks.
Was thinking along similar lines
PI Mania... th-cam.com/video/h4KHoKjc7Ns/w-d-xo.html
As a ZX Spectrum owner since I was a young lad, I never really thought about why the rasters needed to be there. It was all part of the magic for me at the time. Still, your concise explanation is fascinating stuff, love it. :)
Well done on making a video on loading bars entertaining! The way the bars would reflect the sound pulses was quite hypnotic and explains why i became fascinated by MP3 player visualisation on my PC in the 90s!
Great video. One thing to add: on ZX Spectrum it was possible to time perfectly screen pixel update and thus - draw outside of main pixel area (on the borders). It was very complex and very few games have actually done this and that - only for non-interactive parts of the game anyway.
The loading screen games were a great thing back then and even in the optical disc era it would have been great, but Namco Bandai has held a tight grip on that patent and deprived us all of that for 20 years, and now that the patent expired there just isn't that much need for loading screen games.
I miss loading from tape. ..yeah I said it :P
btw the BBC was awesome because it used to count up in hex and if you got a loading error, you could rewind the tape 1-2 secs and try again. I had some games I had to try to load one particular block 7-8 times before it was right. Whereas on the C64 and Speccy, loading error means you start from scratch!
Exactly! That’s the problem with a lot of these modern TH-cam videos, that “look back”, by a lot of people that weren’t even there, with a lot of incorrect information. People complain about Wikipedia, at least the legitimacy of information can queried, verified and corrected. TH-cam videos, will be “untrue” forever! 😞
30 minutes loading of a game that was 100Kb in size...
Ahhh good times
Evi1M4chine+ Even if they meant 100 kilobytes, it could have been fine depending on the system he was using, because you don't have to have something like 70GB of ram to play GTA V. (Also, please change the "64KB or RAM..." to "64KB of RAM..." cause O.C.D.)
That's because modern computers store things on a hard disc drive to be recalled at any time. These old cassette computers often stored things in RAM for use, with tapes providing their stable storage medium. The RAM quantity of the computer dictated the maximum size of a piece of software.
Imagine how people back then would react to a modern computer with SSD's or even M2's which can transfer several hundred megabytes per second. Or in the latter case, over a gigabyte per second.
And in BOTH directions to boot!
If only i could time travel...
Right?
Evi1M4chine and I would have asked how come *you* never heard of the Spectrum 128K
Also still included in many Commodore Amiga decompression software.
I loved the games that would line by line reveal a picture as they loaded. Once the picture was fully revealed the game was just about done.
The picture was probably overwritten with game code later on.
Those bars meant "you still have two and a half minutes to find out if Daley Thompson's Decathlon will crash or not"
I kind of imagined why the raster bars were a thing, in my head one colour represented the 0s and the other represented the 1s that the cassette was loading onto RAM
Kinda, almost, nailed it. Kinda.
I just always figured they were there so more impatient folks would know that "something" was happening. I guess I was kinda right, but it's cool to learn all the details about them!
I wonder if there was ever any complaints of seizures caused by these bands, or if the computer came with a warning for it or what.
I always thought the same thing... I get they wanted to put something on the screen to show users that stuff was loading but I always thought they maybe they could've like slowed down the refresh rate of the bars or something because they are honestly hard on the eyes
Gaming Jay Some loaders did indeed use a slower rate. A number of Mastertronic MAD games used wider slower bars. Ocean, Hewson, Thalamus and indeed Mastertronic did also at various times have just a black border with sprinklings of white indicating where the tape pulses switched state. Easy to do... incrementing the border colour register then decrementing it again immediately (INC $D020 ; DEC $D020)
Thanks for this never heard the term raster bars before now I know.
Also good sir, you deserve many more subscribers and I am sure it is a matter of time before they come in numbers.
Congratulations! This kind of videos of yours are simple, short and effective, and that is one of the best. Deeper than the usual jokes about 80’s retrocomputing ; ) Thank you
I don't remember raster bars when loading from tape on my VIC-20 or my TI-99/4A. Though the TI did make lots of lovely noises; its tape format appeared to be packetized and have a distinctive carrier tone of F above high C, giving tape data for the TI a musical, rhythmic crunching quality.
In retrospect the raster bars are a neat hack. Changing the border color involves poking to a single memory location, something easily done and taking close to no time at all in the middle of a tight loop processing and verifying incoming tape data and giving immediate feedback into how the load is going. Something our modern computer culture, with its vague icons and "something went wrong" error messages, just can't tolerate, alas.
On this note, I hate how condescending Windows 10 is with error messages. Like today I started up the computer and it bluescreened (as I expect to happen every so often since it's overclocked and... well, it's Windows), and then they're just like "If you call a support person, give them this code..." Like, bitch, I AM the support person lol.
@@eddiehimself Yeah, I'm still fond of the Amiga version: Guru Meditation.
I had a MSX, not too many had raster bars, I remember sorcery did which had a flash loader.
I remember buying a tape that was advertised in a MSX magazine which allowed you to load a game into memory then you could save the game into a blank tape and choose the baud rate. Normal baud rate was 1200 or 2400 but this let you save at 3600
This channel is fantastic! Well done and keep up the good work!!
Thank you Mr. S Plonk.
I remember those lines from times when my big brother was not home and I stole his ZX Spectrum, loading the games, getting the "Tape Loading Error"....
Nice one on why horizontal vs. vertical lines, never thought about, gotta admire the practical approach - don't try harder, try easier.
I used to sit for long periods looking at those raster bars, now I finally know why they were there. Thanks for sharing! :)
Cool video! Never thought of what those loading bars meant even thought I spent a good chunk of my childhood staring at them...
So they were basically the 80's equivalent of the hourglass, the universal symbol of "loading"...
Yes indeed. Pretty much exactly what they were, just more entertaining to watch (unless you were prone to seizures)
Amstrad CPC464... Loading up Ikari Warriors and going off to make some pot noodles only to return to a Read Error A.
I loved that game & even better - a lad at school gave me a copy to borrow. A true CPC classic which was more fun to play than the arcade.
I am such a sucker for the late eighties... I so miss them, everything made more sense...
I just want to give a big thumbs up to your channel - entertaining *and* educational - great job!
This is something I have always wondered about. Thanks for posting this. :)
Back in the olden days of dialup modems. I learned to listen to the thing connecting and determining what speed i would get as well as if it was going to succeed in connecting or not. Which was a very common failure point.
That last bit about changing the color was new to me. I always wondered how they could make it flicker so quickly but now i know.
I used to love watching & listening to these loading bars on my ZX Spectrum.
I remember when I was a boy, loading games on tape drives... Going away for dinner... Coming back to find it almost loaded... Then... Tape error.
Never thought much of the origin of those bars. Very interesting!! :)
My brother and I went to show my mom the game "Garbage" on our Timex Sinclair 1000 that we typed in from a book. She saw the raster bars and asked if that was the garbage. Random memory that I somehow never forgot from 35 years ago :-D
The best game to load from tape is "The Last Ninja 2". I get literal bumps on my body from the loading music and then when the entire screen flashes with Raster bars, the feeling intensifies. When the gorgeous artwork appears, the anticipation of playing the game is solidified.
C64 had that Load-It cassette station which had LEDs that showed when the signal was strongest when loading. When you started loading you could easily adjust the azimuth-angle of the cassette player with it. Best angle depended on the cassette and you often had to change it when loading a different game. Neat invention that made loading pretty hassle-free.
Amiga Retroist I personally never had to adjust the head alignment on my datasette and in my experience anyone who did just made the deck more and more temperamental with the continual adjustment. Having routinely, but not continually, adjusted the alignment of audio (and video) tape decks of all descriptions, I know that continual adjustment is a very bad idea.
waiting for my acorn to load helped me understand hex.
Me too.
I loved the various loading screens on my CPC464 and when putting a brand new game cassette in seeing whether it was going to gradually display a render of the picture on the cassette box or just a scatter gun picture of random coloured lines :D
Nicely done, lots of good detail on loading screens, now we all know!
Man, so many nostalgia feels of my old C-64. I wish I was 10 again. I've played modern PC games as an adult, but nothing feels as magical as it was when you were 10 years old, playing Castles of Dr. Creep with a friend...
Used to love my spectrum 48k and +2
Can still remember the change in the sound when the liad screen appeared
I always wondered what the story was with those funky bars ... and now I know. Thank you.
Brings back loads of memories.
How satisfying was loading a game on the speccy, watching the lines then slowly a picture would load in.
One of the reasons for not seeing these on the BBC or Electron is because unlike most other computers, you didn't need to start all over again if the loading crashed. You just needed to rewind the tape a little and it would carry on from where it went wrong.
There was a Hex counter for the progress of the program that's all.
...and then the funky practice was adopted by pirates during the 16-bit computer era because yeah man I still remember those from a few years back. Nice one.
Wow - lots of c64 loading music memories there. Anyone remember "invade-a-load"?
Yes, and does anyone remember the Ocean Loader music?
There were ~5 different variants of the OCEAN loader. All of them pretty good :)
mix-e-loader was pretty impressive, a mini sequencer to play with whilst the game loaded. I often just loaded that part then stopped the tape to mess around with it for half hour or so. I think it was ocean as well.
@@meetoo594 Thalamus
My early childhood...Amstrad CPC 464... Load tape, CTRL+ENTER, then ENTER again. And off it goes with screeching noises from its speaker and then - Read error a (or b)...most of the time... Then you grab a screwdriver and start fiddling with the tape loader head until it works...
Ahh, the memories... :D Then again, as I was only 8 or 9 years old back in 1993, stuff like that made me interested in computers early in my life.
From my memories of the CPC. Mid to late in that machines life all games displayed the raster border effect plus fast loading. Loading screens displayed quicker and I recall one game playing a tune too.
My copy of Commando died an early death, but we used to load it up all the time anyway, just to hear that banging SID cover of Living on Video.
4:30 Nostalgia just from seeing that big red switch + plug socket combo. My parents had something like that in their house.
I remember how smug I felt back then when I bought my first microcomputer, opting to go straight for a CPC 6128 with its floppy disk drive. It literally saved me hours upon hours of waiting for games to load on cassettes... that is, until I decided to save a few bucks on certain games buying them on cassette anyway, and then I was worse off because regular cassette players usually worked like crap when you tried to connect them to the computer. And I don't know about other people, but even with original tapes I had a depressingly high amount of read error with some games, and only with a few of them I could resume the load process if there had been an error (with most you had to start over from the very beginning).
it took me literally months to find the one - one- crappy old tape recorder that would somehow work somewhat most reliably with my ZX....and then the "space invaders" - tape was lying in the sun, warped, and got all knotted up and wrinkled in the wrong places at the next try...aaaarrrrggh....
great clip, great research hard work...
This is one part of the 8-bit world that I missed. My Franklin Ace had no tape port, and had to use a floppy to load software.
Actually, most home PCs of that era used FSK (Frequency Shift Keying), a super simple modulation system which used two different audio frequencies to represent 1s & 0s, typically at 300 baud (hence their extreme slowness to load). PWM/PCM was used for sound effects, etc.
Operation Wolf... I'd totally forgotten about that game until I see that loading screen, good times.
Very interesting I though that on the 64 this lines were just a side effect of the CPU being to busy reading data from the tape, since datasette unit were insane simplistic and most of the job was done in the kernal routines. But not for too long, as you pointed, most of the games started to use turbo loaders that swap the kernal routines with more efficient ones once the loader was on memory.
Happened on the STE as well, mainly with pirated games. Pompey Puff Pirates etc.
F* the ST(E).
AMIGA ruled! :oP
I have always wanted to know this!! Better watch!
I've always wondered about this, thanks! For many years as a child I thought raster bar loading routines meant the games were bootlegged in some way!
Huh, I had sort of decided that on the C64 that they were using the video memory for data-transfer or something to make loading faster and that that was why you saw the colors. Well, now I know.
Cassette storage failed in dozens of unique ways, and not all machines/titles were capable of notifying you the process had gone awry. The loading bars gave you some assurance that a signal was at least coming from the tape and reaching the computer. That's probably why they were retained on hardware that didn't force them.
I remember how I'd PRESS PLAY ON TAPE when I was called to the dinner table as a kid, and when I was excused I'd rush back to my room to see if Pogo Joe loaded or if I needed to try again. It was a super bummer to come back to an error message. :D
I remember these from some Atari ST games (usually PD ones) which kept these on out of habit (or possibly due to being a direct port from Speccy code) the multicolour raster bars amused my young mind no end without knowing these were a hangover from the cassette tape storage medium slightly before my time!
The Commodore 64's biggest issue was it's tape drive as it was based on the tape drive for the Commodore PET (It was quite possibly the same drive) The obvious way to speed up loading would have been to speed up the motor as it was only ever used to load games. And for those who don't know high speed dubbing also worked for games (most of the time).
I always called them loading bars, never heard the term rasta bars until today.
Sometimes if I'm feeling nostalgic I'll actually search for videos to watch & listen to games loading from a Speccy.
My childhood consisted of typing Load "" & pressing play, listen to that for 5 minutes only to realise the volume was ever so slightly off.
Sometimes I'd get the excitement of hearing the tape chewing up so I'd have to dive for the stop button. Then I get treated to the 'Pencil & Cassette' minigame.
Gamers now are missing out with their fast load times & pre installed games.
Ah... that is why my friends c64 took so long load. Loaded slower. I remember my spectrum sometimes not giving the name.... then had to fiddle with volume and tone. And the distinct sound of a screen loading and then coloring it.
I recall some loaders on the speccy had timers or a "window" in the graphics in which the bars would continue to fly through.
That was fascinating!
I remember stopping the cassette on the C 64 while loading so as to hear all of Martin Galway's brilliant music on the ocean loader.
I'm glad I lived thru the mesolithic era of home computing. There's still something pretty soothing about these shitty long-winded loading screens and crap blocky graphics that still manages to warm the cockles :-)
0:32 I had that cassette recorder. A WH Smith model if I'm not mistaken. I think mine had A red LED for record / saving and a green LED for playback / loading though.
Thank you - I've waited 30 years for someone to address this!
Fascinating!
In the Eastern Europe each country built several types of Spectrum clones. They were large, ugly and clunky but worked.
Everyone drilled a hole in the faceplate of the casette player where the magnetic head adjustment screw was placed while playing. The loading bars provided invaluable information on adjusting the head's azymuth with a screwdriver - important especially when exchanging tapes with someone else.
What about Pentagon and Scorpion? And ATM? They switched to disk interfaces, Beta-Disk interface clones mostly...
I used them as a visual aid to help load in problem games. Above the play button on my cassette recorder there was a tiny hole which (with a tiny screwdriver) I used to tune the sound on the fly and the better the sound got the straighter the lines got and the better chance the game had of loading in
To me it said, "pray that the game loads and hold on to your butt!". I still remember loading up Sanxion on my C64 for the very first time and being blown away hearing this awesome music playing while the game loaded (I think it was the first C64 game I ever played). What's up with the Atari ST though? I've noticed those bars while some disks load.
Atari ST is a 16bit with the sound chip os an 8bit computer, maybe it's nostalgia...
Some exe (sorry - prg) compressors used to display these bars on ST while decompressing data. This could take a while, the FDD was inactive, so to show that something is happening, these bars were shown.
I had an Electron, so it was the horror of, "Data, Rewind Tape". My bro insists that one time, after hours of trying to get one particular tape to load, it finally worked when I threatened the system with a screwdriver. :D
Joke is, years later I discovered that a normal hifi tape deck worked waaaay better than those stupid mono tape units sold as "data recorders" (aka crappy tape unit with a "Datacorder" sticker put on, jack up price by a tenner). Tried old tapes and they suddenly loaded ok.
300 baud modem... start download before school.. maybe it will be done when you get home.
still have that exact loading cassette player in the loft from when i had a ZX spectrum
I've heard the bars (sometimes.) were used for storing data "on screen" like a cache by some Turbo Loaders while they were uncompacting data??
I think you could shove data into the border using some clever trickery with the screen stack space, not sure about the bars themselves. Maybe? Seems pretty arduous, but coders used to love doing crazy shit like that.
Reminds me of a PC I used that had the headphone jack right beside the USB port. It wasn't well shielded, so if I had headphones plugged in but no music on, I could hear noise as the data transferred from my USB stick.
Eventually I fried that USB stick with an accidental jolt of static electricity. I could immediately tell because, instead of the usual patterns of data being transferred, I'd just hear a solid tone for a few seconds before Windows reported an error. Clearly the USB part was still working but no actual data was being sent from the flash chip anymore...
Here in the States, the Atari eight-bit computers didn't have loading bars for cassette games. Instead, the loading screen for a cassette game like "States and Capitals" displayed a large Atari logo, accompanied by music and narration.
The C64 natively provided a raster interrupt that would call a routine of your program when the tv-scanline hits some vertical position. Your routine changes the background color immediately and voila, the beginning of a raster bar.
This was (nearly) not possible for horizontal positions because the tv-electron-beam wanders quickly left to right and then from row to row. The machines back then simply were not fast enough to switch colors precisely at a horizontal position, there was no interrupt for horizontal positions, and it would also make the cpu busy only doing that in each tv-scanline-row again and again.
I had a Commodore 64 and always assumed the bars were generated based on the audio from the tape, and that it was a basic indicator of progress, not that the progress was very fast. I remember a game that took 23 minutes to load.
There are 10 types of raster bars....those which have games on and those that don't and just Crash!
Do you mean 10 binary, as in 2 decimal ways?
I never knew that existed. The only cassette based computer I had was the TI99/4A. Once I got my C128 I bought the disk drive with it.
Wow. So I finally found out what the Last Ninja Loading Tunes are for on the C64. Of course, when it takes to play the tape for minutes it makes sense to have some music there.
I'd always assumed that data on tapes was encoded with FSK rather than PWM. Well, you learn something new every day :)
ChayD It actually was FSK - eack bit would take two transitions but a bit of 1 was encoded with a longer interval / lower frequency than bit 0. A data block made out only of of 0 bits would load about twice as fast as one consisting entirely of ones.
Oh the days I used to play around with those loading/saving routines in the speccy rom... I used to tweak the code so it would load and save faster :D
Great vid! Thank you.
keep the "byte size" vids coming!
the way your videos start with spectrum loading borders with an image that 'loads' completely unlike a spectrum makes me *eyetwitch* every time
super informative and fun video! Unfortunately due to the pricing of Home personal computers back in the eighties and nineties I was never able to experience the tape technology. Actually had a loner Apple 2E with a external 5. To 5 floppy disk drive. I was legally blind so the school and disability teacher really emphasized the importance for me to use the computer to learn. so I actually learned using speech synthesis software that read what was on the screen and what was being typed and there were lots of games that helped me learn how to type when I was in kindergarten. no speech synthesis has came a long way since then I feel like there should have been more room for improvement because it really hasn't came as far as it should have in the time that it is been developed over. maybe you should definitely do a video on speech synthesis
I was always impressed by the decrunching from video memory garbage on C64 screens.Even more so when the coder had their signature embedded somewhere in the screen.
I'm kind of surprised that I never even questioned what the loading bars were about. It was just one of those things I accepted.
Chris Mingay my guess was that as the ZX81 produced the screen by the procesor itself, to ensure loading was not interrupted at the wrong point (by the screen draw) it ran in "fast" mode with the TV output turned off. As other micros of the time had a mechanism to let you know how the loading was going, the tape in was directed to the screen and hence the bar pattern which also helped volume setting. With the Spectrum the screen generation was handled by a ULA so could be displayed at all times without slowing programs as the processor did not need to stop and generate the display. they could have put some counter like Acorn but decided to use the border area and continue the use of bars.
It’s both typical and sad, that in a British made video about this topic, the best 8 bit computer of all time is completely ignored: the Atari 8 bits homecomputers. FYI: they didn’t need loading bars since the system had a feature build in that made any loading of cassettes AND floppies audible through its typical beep sounds. For tapes, you did not only hear the source signal from the tape itself but also the ”confirmed bits” by beeps generated by the system itself. When things would go wrong during loading (which was rare compared to many other systems) you would hear the tone of the beeps change, and anyone who had hear things “go wrong” during loading before would recognise it before even the machine generating an error.
The beeps were also present (unless turned off by the software) On any floppy loading, and again it was an aid to deter in if things were going OK. When I switched from A8 to an Atari ST, it was the first thing I missed badly….
Anyway, loading bars were still sometimes created by some software, but usually it was more during unpacking instead of loading.
To be fair, the BBC Micro's way of doing it was so much better. Programs loaded in numbered blocks, so you knew it was loading because the counter kept going up, but best of all: if there was a tape-loading error, you could just rewind the tape a bit and have repeated run-ups at that troublesome block, and loading would continue from there :)
Couldn't believe it when I got a Speccy and it just crapped out entirely if there was any loading error - no matter how many minutes into loading you were, you just had to start over and hope for a better result next time. I recall some later Speccy games adopting the BBC's "block loader" approach, which was nice to see. Shame it wasn't hard-coded into the ROM, though!
on computers that come with tape decks which have a fixed volume level, it is needed to adjust the height of the playback/record head to the tracks on the tape... which specifically on the shitty cheap tapedecks commodore chunked out (the c2n datasette) was a frequent nessesity. even when glueing them shut on your units, tapes supplied by others usually had different track alignments. atari sold 1 tape deck with the xe series that was internally more or less identical to the commodore c2n, (minus the analog to digital conversion in the tape deck itself like commodore had) also was of this cheap type getting misaligned over time... the xl model usually worked fine and required no adjustment whatsoever. 'volume adjustment' is not an issue with either of the data recorders that came with their own super special plug... head adjustment was. (basically most of it was just the cheapest crap they could find in terms of the inner mechanics ;) - this is what the little hole in the c2n top side is for, somewhere in the label... a screwdriver goes through it and adjust the head to the track on the tape ;) a frequent pain in the butt.
(minus the analog to digital conversion in the tape deck itself like commodore had)
That reminded me of hacking my Commodore Tape to use it as "sound digitizer" back then.
Cor, blast from the past. I always thought of these like I thought of the old strobe guns used for timing engines. Neither of whcih we see much nowadays.
great vid!