Did anybody ever find floppy disks annoying?

[switchblade]

BTW, I'm asking this question in the past context, like WAY BACK in the late 80's/mid 90's.

I never really grew up with an Amiga (DOS & console gamer here), and so I've been learning more about the home computer that had never been in America (because I've never heard of the Amiga until last year). Which is why I'm asking that question.

I can't really imagine how annoying it must have been to load and play an A500 game from the floppy drive. Compared to the load times I hear people complaining about today, the Amiga's load times were just downright appalling, and the disk swapping can sometimes destroy the fun for me (if I had to juggle more than 3 or 4 disks, that is). I've tried out Lotus 3 on both DOS and Amiga, and I honestly could not stand waiting for the Amiga version to boot up and play. This is due to the fact, however, that my old DOS PC had a 80 or 100 MB HDD, and most DOS games I've played had to be installed onto the HDD. I don't know if the A500 had an installable HDD, but I can't imagine having to swap disks just to play Monkey Island 1 or 2 on the Amiga.

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?

[Predseda]

It depends how clever the disk routines were. Sometimes I ENJOYED the loading from floppies, with all those specific sounds. Some games you could recognise just for their disk loading sounds (good examples are Lemmings or Powermonger). I can say I really miss em now, when I play everything through WHD load. But some games, with a lot of diskswapping, were really annoying.

[PowerPie5000]

To be honest i still play some games from floppy on both my A500 and A1200, but mainly my A500 for compatibility. I just get used to the loading times and disk swapping after a while.... may just be nostalgia but i like it

I personally prefer cartridges as a game format but it is cheaper to produce discs instead. Imagine the next gen consoles being cartridge based

Anyway the loading sounds let me know my Amiga is still alive

[T_hairy_bootson]

Its just the way it was. The disk juggling was annoying but I was more annoyed at the games creators for not doing it better or allowing multiple drives to be used.

[Predseda]

And still - in comparison to casette tapes... floppies were just GREAT :-D

[PowerPie5000]

Originally Posted by Predseda

And still - in comparison to casette tapes... floppies were just GREAT :-D

I second that! the old C64 and speccy tested my patience at times

[Predseda]

At least - C64 had Turbo 250, which meant some 17 spins per game, but Speccy? 100 rounds / one game? OMG, those were patient times!

[TCD]

Oh it was cool to load a game from a tape You could prepare some snacks, make some coffee, your homework and read something

Coming from the C64 I liked the loading times of Amiga games. Most of the games I had were on one or two disks anyway and supported a second drive. That changed when I got Monkey Island II... can't say that I really enjoyed playing it from floppies

[Retro-Nerd]

Fortunately i never had a datasette. Got a C64 and 1541 floppy in 1986. WHDLoad for the win, hehe.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

Fortunately i never had a datasette.

That explains a lot

[Predseda]

I liked the loading tunes and visual effects in games, like Turricans, Paradroid, Uridium etc. It was unique, PC users have never experienced it.

[PowerPie5000]

It was good how you could copy a cassette game just by popping it into an old hi-fi system and just record it onto another tape

[blackcornflake]

Originally Posted by switchblade

Did anybody honestly think back then 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?

As Einstein nearly said, everything's relative. I thought floppies were lightning fast because I had been used to loading stuff from tape. But once I'd experienced hard drives, they didn't seem so fast at all.

You come from a PC and console background, so that informs your perspective - I personally thought nothing of load times on the A500, because it was a step up.

The drive click narked me no end, though.

[paranoid]

It's a little silly of a question, to be honest. Back then, it's all we knew and had. Sure there were cartridges for consoles, etc that were instant, but those weren't copyable, and even when playing a game you saw this keyboard and knew you were doing computer-stuff with it, unlike having just a joystick plugged into a 2600. Though, sure, there were hard drives, and some games would install to them, but in general it was a floppy based system. It's also the case that you'd then appreciate things like the loading screen art or the occasional music or something that would keep you mildly amused while you sat there (conversely, very annoyed when programmers didn't use a 2nd drive, bad swapping, etc).

Also, if you went to the Amiga from the C64 (or something with similar, excruciating load times) the Amiga's floppies were incredibly fast.

I think the question would be like, in 20 years, wondering how people could have got along staring at a monitor all the time, when people in 2029 put on VR glasses.

[PowerPie5000]

My main gripe with floppies and tapes is the poor reliability! I look after my games but they still fail now and then... floppies and tapes were not the most reliable format but it's all that was about back then... and cartridges.

[alexh]

Better than waiting what seemed like hours for a cassette to load and have it fail at the last second and have to load it again on 3/4 volume and tone set to 7 instead of 6!

Who here bought their floppy disks from the magazine recycling company?? 100's of ex-cover disks at 10p each!

[sneeker]

I remember buying ex cover discs from a northern computer markets stall that they set up, surprisingly, in our local market.

I never had a machine with tape, actually, I had something on tape for my bbc, and got it to run, but I had a disk drive from about 2 weeks after getting the machine (They had to come from england, and we where based in Germany at the time, they arrived a month apart)

[MazinKaesar]

I still love C64 5 1/4 floppies... XD

[Paul_s]

Using tapes on a specturm in around 1985 the disk drive on an Amiga in 1991 was a revelation for me I don't mind at all loading games from disk drive... although games such as Beneath a Steel Sky and Amazon Queen were annoying - I ended up with 3 disk drives!

I play on CD32 quite a bit and miss the old disk drive.... I think I'm in love with floppys

[KONEY]

I love floppies! Anyway I always had HDs on my Amigas!