In this post I will write about my experiences of trying to make my games run on the Commodore 64 C2N Datasette back in the days. I did not own a disk drive, so I was dependent on a trusty Datasette cassette player for running the games on my tapes. As commonly known, the heads of the Datasette sometimes required to be aligned to ensure smooth operations. This alignment was performed by turning a small screw. Software, such as the Azimuth head alignment package, could assist the user with this process. Below are some of my experiences. Keep in mind that these are written from memories from the early 1990s (I was a late bloomer when it comes to C64 ownership, but loved every minute of it!).
- In my experience, most of my games worked flawlessly without any adjustment / alignment needed. This was the position of the datasette head that could be achieved either by a few iterations, or through using the Azimuth alignment tape (it came with the Bandana City game). I used “Batman the movie” from Hit Squad as a reference game here: if it loaded, most other games would do so to.
- A few games however, seemed to require the adjustment screw being turned a little bit to one direction to work. These games were particularly dodgy, and this adjustment caused all other games to not load (examples: Real Ghostbusters in the Beau Jolly Big Box collection, and Indiana Jones & the temple of Doom from KIXX).
- Some games just refused to work, no matter how many adjustments I made. In hindsights, I think these tapes/games were just broken (example: Karnov in the Beau Jolly Big Box collection).
- My father owned a good dual deck tape recorder, capable of creating very good copies of tapes. It was good enough to copy C64 games one to one. However, I think this was a rare machine. I attempted to make copies this way on other dual decks, and they just failed to do so. This dual deck would also create excellent copies of music tapes, without too much background noise. I even made a good copy of the Azimuth software using this machine.
- A weird memory I have from making copies with the dual deck recorder is that the copied games would run once on the C64, but fail to load again. This is a strong memory, and it happened on several occasions, but I have no explanation to why it would happen: why would a game succeed to load a first time, but not after that?
The above bullets are mostly “notes to self”, but I figured I would write them down in case of anyone else have similar memories from trying to make tapes working on the C64. In sum, most of my games worked. Only a few required adjustments, and a few other games were probably just broken. Some interesting phenomena occured when copying tapes.
