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Retrocomputing

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    The size of the tape used doesn’t determine how long the game takes to load. I don’t know about the BBC Micro LotR, but the Atari 8-bit port of Gauntlet fits on a single C60 tape (using both sides). Commented Oct 30, 2020 at 13:22
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    These games loaded in stages, though -- you'd load one part, play through it, then load the next part, and so on. They were big games that didn't fit into memory, which explains why they needed longer tapes. Commented Nov 7, 2020 at 7:07
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    IIRC, loading Gauntlet from commercial cassette on my Atari 800XL had about a 5% success rate, and on the occasions when it did work, took about 25 minutes for the engine and the first 3 levels, then about another 15 minutes for each set of 3 levels thereafter. (And the RAM capacity of the 800XL was 64kiB as per Q). Commented Oct 21, 2022 at 16:07
  • The size of the tape doesn't determine the load time, no. It determines the playback time of the cassette, if it took longer than 15 mins to stream the data then you had to turn the tape over. but yeah if it took 30s to stream the data you had a lot of empty tape. Don't really get why this needed elaborating on. Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 8:51
  • it's like saying a usb stick isn't 1TB because there's only 3 photos on it... Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 8:58