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.
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.