The Def Guide to Zzap!64

some of my games wouldnt load unless i was in another room, turned the tape deck upsidedown or in extreme cases wraped the tape machine in a teatowel.
any one else do this sort of thing or was i mad back then.

Definaltly!!!!

The upside down one was a fave - the strange thing was that it actually worked for some games that didnt loan " normally "

ANother fave of mine was keeping the play button pressed down hard using my thumb - again, it suprisingly worked!

Well I remember moving the ground wire around the place that poked out of the C2N plug. But for the most part during the later years, my C2N had its cover off and a screwdriver lying close to it for changing the alignment of the heads screw. Although once you started that, there's no going back and you have to ajust it for nearly every tape!

It was a shit way of loading stuff wasn't it? (ie by tape) but at least we had a dedicated tape player and not some dodgy tape recorder of Granddad's connected to a speccy with coat hanger wire!

oh god yeah, i read how to adjust the heads in commodore format. It was all downhill after that.

Exploding Fist and Rock & Wrestle, I had to do the hold down the play key thing to get them to load.

Then there was the Azimuth 3000 or something imilar - an actual programme that helped you align the heads. You had to turn the min screwdriver until the screen stoped flashing - whilst there was a countdown ( if I remember )

Fiery Phoenix wrote:Then there was the Azimuth 3000 or something similar - an actual programme that helped you align the heads. You had to turn the min screwdriver until the screen stoped flashing - whilst there was a countdown ( if I remember )

I actually bought one of these off eBay recently......had always heard about them, still haven't got round to seeing if it actually works

A mate of mine was CONVINCED "if you make sure the cassette player cable is completely straight the data doesnt get held up in the kinks" I laughed back then too....

What a shame Ray Davies got all that blame, eh?!

Professor Brian Strain wrote:Exploding Fist and Rock & Wrestle, I had to do the hold down the play key thing to get them to load.

Bloody hell! Do you remember those loaders?! They were a pain! Whenever there was an error, the screen boarder would turn white and you would have to rewind the tape a little and then press play ... clever in some way, but FRUSTRATING in another.

I actually had a dudd tape deck for 6 months and couldn't get a single game to loads ... except that is for Exploding fists! Saying that, I did have to stop the tape and rewind/play around 30 times!

Anyway, one of my rituals was to put something heavy on top of the tape desk

i used to use the ground wire on the tape deck to reset my 64 (third pin on the cartridge port), in fact thats what i thought it was for!

Shit! No wonder half your games didn't load! That couldn't have been good for the datacassette!

now you come to mention it, it was about the time i started to do that when my games started to get more and more unreliable

i always found the later zzap megatapes and the commodore force ones to be very reliable, were really high quality cassettes used?

later on i started recording over them with masters of my bands tunes, exelent sound quality those tapes!