>Compared to the load times I hear people complaining about today, the Amiga's load times were just downright appalling

>Does anybody honestly think that floppy drives back then weren't so bad to deal with compared to today? Did people have more patience with those load times back then?

I don't see much difference in loading times with loading a "modern" game off eg. a hard drive vs. loading a classic game from floppy. It seems the publishers just pile in more bloated garbage to keep the load times approximately the same.
Eg. Out Run 2 takes 10 seconds or more of loading between races, even when just restarting the race you were already doing. And this on a machine with 1Gb RAM. It just makes no sense. (Out Run 2 being one of the few modern games that is worth putting up with the delays.)

WB 1.3 loading time from floppy is faster than Windows 7 running on an i7. I know because I timed one yesterday! :D

From SSD too? :D

Just a thought: While loading from floppies was slow compared to loading from pricy HDDs, there was no need to boot up some stupid OS from the same HDD first. So in many cases, the overall loading time balances out.

Other than that, I agree with those who compared floppies to tapes. Wow, what an improvement! Not just because of loading times, but because you knew loading would work reliably.

Some later games were annoying, Streetfighter 2 being a good example. But the same can be said about any format at the end of its life cycle.

But the big annoyance is the same today as it was back then bad design, unskippable logos, intros and bad streaming.

You know
(brrr click click) Codemasters present
(brr brr ) a SomeStudio game
(clickclick) (mod starts) MAGIC FOREST!
(nothing, drive not even loading, 10 seconds later, insert disk 2)

Today its
Sony logo.. (load for 0.5 seconds then wait wait wait, fade out)
BSA copy is stealing a car(load for 0.5 seconds then wait wait wait, fade out)
Codemasters...(load for 0.5 seconds then wait wait wait, fade out)
SomeStudio ... (load for 0.5 seconds then wait wait wait, fade out)
3rdPartyEngine (load for 0.5 seconds then wait wait wait, fade out)
3rdpartyPhysics (load for 0.5 seconds then wait wait wait, fade out)
BrilliantPreRenderMovie (hitbutton, hitbutton, finally fades out)
ActualStartScreen (CreateNew game, then wait wait wait, fade out)
NonSkippableTutorial (DoObviousActionOneAtaTime, finally get to game)
NonSkippableIngameCinematicIntro (hitbutton, hitbutton, finally fades out)

Yay I get control stuff!!

And don't get me started on Blu-ray or DVDs.. they don't even have anything to load.

Yeah, floppies were heaven. Only waiting 1-2 minutes to load a game compared to 5-15 on the C64 felt like driving a Formula 1 car. Today I get annoyed when it takes 15 seconds to open the web browser.

Best thing I ever did was buy an external floppy drive! I was then only annoyed by 2 disk games that could not use the second drive.

Moving from a Spectrum tape deck to an Amiga 500 floppy drive was a great journey. So I never found the floppy disk annoying.

So I agree with other comments that floppies were heaven.

I did not mind loading from floppy disks compared to the C64 tapes. Although I hated swapping, it was a god send when the HD arrived mainly because U have more space to store data than the limited floppy disks (880 kb). I know that sounded a lot of space back in the day. Surely U would agree HD or even CD is the best medium for modern computers even now when we are using emulators to play games and go back to the days of programming software from our bedrooms. :)

This 1997 vs. 1984 boot times vid uses an old Macintosh, but definitely rang true when thinking of booting Workbench too!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmRJ649ICPU

It's a funny video indeed. But that laptop is just crap. I have a ~1.5 year old 13" HP lappie that came with Vista and i used it for 9 months with it, before fresh installing Win 7 last December and i can assure you my laptop booted Vista in less than 30 seconds.

Regarding the topic of this thread coming from a Speccy tape to the A500 floppy i found it a God send thing. 1 minute to load a game instead of 7? Total win. \o/

I still use floppies today on my A500 and i think for the retro feel there is nothing better. But for anything else floppies are just a bit annoying.

Q: Did anybody ever find floppy disks annoying?
A: Yes!

I came from an old Challenger computer in the 70's that used a tape recorder with plugs that went into the earphone and mic sockets - the thing would print out your program as it loaded, about the same speed as a 300 baud modem, you could see your program glitching before your very eyes.
The c64 tape drive was 'speedy' compared to that.. it's disk driver seemed like lightspeed.
That being said, after going to the Amiga floppy, the C64 drive seemed pedestrian.

The speed of the floppy never annoyed me that much (until I got used to the Hard Drive) - it was the swapping that bugged me when I originally had an A500.

Going back again, I don't think I could use an Ami that didn't have a HD... but that's technology for you, once you get used to the convenience of one thing it's always hard to go back.

loading many games were pain in the ... neck, indeed. How I envied those PC users playing Sierra titles comfortably. On the other hand the data stored on my Amiga floppies is still readable today, unlike many cd's I burned in the 2000s. Not to mention 4 hard drives, which died on me in the last 5 years! Almost entire data is gone.