The masters of Commodore 64 games

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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).

I can only speak for Germany and my bubble, but we definitely had more datasettes than 1541s.

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.

http://dmweb.free.fr/community/documentation/copy-protection...

Nearly 40 years later, I still wouldn't call it "wasted time".

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 :)

The software itself was impressive, a full-featured word processor with an 80 column display.

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.