A small screwdriver could be used to align the tape heads, and a few companies capitalized by selling various commercial kits for Datasette head-alignment tuning.Īs the Datasette lacked any random read-write access, users had to either wait while the tape ran its length, while the computer printed messages like "SEARCHING FOR ALIEN BOXING. Also, not too dissimilar to floppy drive users, the Datasette's read head could become dirty or slip out of alignment. Users also had to contend with interference from magnetic fields. One such minigame fastloader was Invade-a-Load. More advanced fast-loaders included minigames for the user to play while the program loaded from cassette. Other fast-loaders included load screens, displaying computer artwork while the program loaded. Early versions of Novaload had the ability to play music while a program loaded into memory, and was easily recognizable by its black border and digital bleeping sounds on loading.
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Novaload was perhaps the most popular tape-loader used by British and American software developers. Many European software developers wrote their own fast tape-loaders which replaced the internal KERNAL code in the C64 and offered loading times more comparable to disk drive speeds. Loading a large program at normal speed could take up to 30 minutes in extreme cases. The Datasette's speed was very slow (about 300 baud). An adapter for the proprietary connector was available from CARDCO Data tapes could be write-protected in the same way as audio cassettes, by punching out a tab on the cassette's top edge. Standard blank audio cassettes could be used in this drive. The Datasette plugged into a proprietary edge connector on the Commodore 64's motherboard. By contrast, in Europe, the C64 was often used with cassette tape drives (Datasette), which were much cheaper, but also much slower than floppy drives.
In the United States, the 1541 floppy disk drive was widespread.
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