Question About Cassette Drives.
Question About Cassette Drives.
I know that Atari/Sega style joysticks work with the VIC-20, and I was curious if the VIC-20 would work with other company's cassette drives? I'm not exactly sure and don't to waste money on an incompatible drive that costs less than the CN2 model. Thanks for any help that can be offered!
Just so we're totally clear: tapes drives for OTHER (non-commodore) computers are non compatible with the VIC, but there were several companies that made clone drives for the Commodore only.
Last edited by ral-clan on Sat Dec 23, 2006 1:40 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Nope, that's not correct. Both my C128D's has tape ports. But they are the plastic version of the C128D. Maybe the C128DCR (metallic casing) was without tape port?Tepic wrote:
Do I remember correctly that the c128D didn't have a tape port?
// Zee
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Yeah, pretty much EVERYONE I knew in Canada got rid of their datasette when they upgraded from VIC-20 to C64. I knew tons of people with Commodore 64s in high school, and we all had 1541s. No one used a datasette anymore in Canada (and the US, from what I had heard).Tepic wrote:Who'd want a 64 without a tape drive?
So I found it very strange when I found out the datasettes were still the main storage medium for C64 in Europe.
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I used a Datasette for years with my VIC and then C64. I simply couldn't afford a 1541 until later.
I don't miss it at all I keep one around "just in case", but never really use it.
As for a price, the Cincinnati Commodore club has them for sale for $2. Yes, $2.
http://www.geocities.com/c64-128-amiga/sale/hard.txt
I don't miss it at all I keep one around "just in case", but never really use it.
As for a price, the Cincinnati Commodore club has them for sale for $2. Yes, $2.
http://www.geocities.com/c64-128-amiga/sale/hard.txt
It wasn't even all of Europe, really, it was mostly the UK where they were so popular. Other countries that were big C= places were mostly disk by the mid 80s too, like Sweden, Finland, Norway, Germany. Disk was very common in Australia too, fwiw.ral-clan wrote:So I found it very strange when I found out the datasettes were still the main storage medium for C64 in Europe.
It wasn't so much that the C2N was popular so much as the 1541 et al was unpopular and the reason was price. The 64 was already considerably more expensive than the Spectrum and most folks couldn't/didn't want to spend the extra money for a floppy disk drive.Jeff-20 wrote:What do you think the reaason was for its popularity in the UK?
In the end it will be as if nothing ever happened.
I have a friend who was teaching in (what was then) Czechoslovakia in the early 90s. He said that people he knew there were still using C64s, and they all had datasettes using some sort of turbo tape loading software. We both thought this was quite funny, as we (in Canada) had all moved on to Amiga stuff several years before, and probably hadn't seen a datasette since our VIC-20 days in the early 80s.
Yes, it was a cost thing as I recall.
Yes, it was a cost thing as I recall.
That's true for all of Europe I suppose, although disk drives seem to have been more common in Scandinavia and Germany than in the UK. C= computers were at the low end of the market in North America but not so here. When my family bougth our C64 and 1541 in early 1984 the computer and disk drive cost around SEK 4000 each if i remember correctly. Added up this amounted to almost a month's pay for, say, a blue collar worker or an office clerk.ral-clan wrote:Yes, it was a cost thing as I recall.
That would be comparable to the price of a high-end PC package today. And this was at a time when nobody really had a good idea of what you would do with a home computer, so of course a lot of people went for the much cheaper datassette.
Bacon
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Das rubbernecken Sichtseeren keepen das cotton-pickenen Hands in die Pockets muss; relaxen und watschen die Blinkenlichten.
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Das rubbernecken Sichtseeren keepen das cotton-pickenen Hands in die Pockets muss; relaxen und watschen die Blinkenlichten.