In most cases, the loaders will use the same trick

[Nayon1]

And here we find ourselves, a significant number of paragraphs later, to what inspired this walk down tape-loading memory lane: the forgotten minutes-long time of the experience of loading these tapes on the Commodore 64, and the many different ways that companies tried to keep buyers from restlessly complaining the tapes weren’t “working” and giving up before the long loading times revealed the programs.

The Ultimate Tape Archive is an effort to preserve these cassette-based titles, including the data on the tape, scans of the tapes themselves, and of the cassette case inserts, papers inside the case, that provided instructions or cover art. The group behind this project have been tirelessly approaching the acquisition and preservation for years, and as of this writing, version 4.0 contains over 2,000 individual tapes.

To honor their work and provide the final step in experiencing them, it is possible to visit the Ultimate Tape Archive on the Internet Archive and emulate these items in the browser. Doing so, however, will be committing the slow burn, the steady and time-consuming cassette loading of the programs.

Luckily, for this essay, a machine stepped forward to do the work.

Utilizing the SCREENSHOTGUN program, the thousands of cassettes from this collection accurate cleaned numbers list from frist database were “inserted”, “loaded”, and “played”, over the course of a month, to allow a later quick assessment of the experience of loading them. The reasoning behind this was that companies employed not just clever, but inspiring ways to distract end-users.

What follows are some of the highlights.


we saw with the ZX-81, except with color: a rapidly pulsating, moving set of lines reflecting that something is happening, and data is coming in. A sense of “hold on, everything is working”, not requiring a lot of machine time to provide, and swapping between colors for a few minutes before a burst of music and graphics came at the end of a reward.

The main variations are the use of different lines or arrangement of lines to reflect this. For example, this thinner and more “high resolution”-feeling version: