> 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.
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.