Loading times - Page 3

Mr Softy · 02 July 2003, 17:06

Quote:

Originally posted by Syko
Also worth a mention is 'Alpha Centauri', which deserves to be called 'After Civ' as it's what happens after the colony ship gets to AC... and if you've not got it yet, and like Civ, go buy soonest!

Brilliant game. Especially the ability to design custom units. The graphics are pretty ugly (why does Planet have to be pink?

), but the gameplay is excellent.

Syko · 02 July 2003, 17:37

Quote:

why does Planet have to be pink?

Coz it's embarassed about putting up with humans

Wally · 05 July 2003, 12:31

Can't comment on loading times, but I always hated the sound of an Amiga floppy drive. All that grinding noise even on a brand new just out of the box Amiga 500.

Anyone who never had a commodore 64 can stop complaining about slow loading. The data cassette was a frigin pain in the arse to use, some of the games took as long as 30 min to load.

andyr · 05 July 2003, 21:39

Did anyone else actually know how much longer a game had to load from the sounds the floppy drive made?

I think I played Superfrog so much that I knew how I long I had to wait from different grinding sounds from the drive!

...or was I just weird?

(BTW, that very same drive on my A500 is still working perfectly which is amazing considering the punishment it used to go through and the fact that it's never been cleaned inside!)

haynor666 · 06 July 2003, 09:15

Sounds from Body Blows were terrible.

fiath · 06 July 2003, 10:55

Quote:

Originally posted by andyr
Did anyone else actually know how much longer a game had to load from the sounds the floppy drive made?

I think I played Superfrog so much that I knew how I long I had to wait from different grinding sounds from the drive!

...or was I just weird?

Hey no way, unless I am weird too. Listening to the disk drive was a very good progress bar!

Amiga1992 · 07 July 2003, 19:34

Yup, listening to the bar is great too. We are al weirdos maybe

It let me diagnose if a disk got fucked up or not, because of the different sounds.

Dizzy · 07 July 2003, 20:41

Quote:

Originally posted by Wally
Can't comment on loading times, but I always hated the sound of an Amiga floppy drive. All that grinding noise even on a brand new just out of the box Amiga 500.

Anyone who never had a commodore 64 can stop complaining about slow loading. The data cassette was a frigin pain in the arse to use, some of the games took as long as 30 min to load.

press play
..Found USUX ...............................................ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZBIP BIP BUTTAAAAHHHhH oh it's finish.. press 1 or 2 for number of player ...1.............................................ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZBIP BIP BUTTAAAAhhhhhahh oh now a can play... BUMB shit I die.... Press rewind..

I think "Rise of the dragon" or "Kings Quest V" took ags to load, and ages to load between screens..

Tim Janssen · 08 July 2003, 09:46

...are really a cure for people suffering insomnia.
I remember I once copied Nebulus on C64 from disc to tape. The datasette-counter stopped at 200 when the game was finally loaded. Taking the pace of the cassette into account (five seconds for 1 counter) the game took a bloody 17 minutes to load!

Also, if there is one game which has the longest and most frequent loading times, it is The Software Business' Ooops Up. Unbelievable that such a simple game needs so much disk accessing.

7-Zark-7 · 12 August 2003, 04:35

Quote:

Originally posted by Kada
any sierra game that didn't use the old text interpreter (games from 1991 and up). they were horrible.... i think king's quest 6 was pretty quick though but that one was a little unusual.... (it was ported several years after the PC version).

Kings Quest VI was coded in the UK by developers Revolution,(Lure of the Temptress,Beneath a Steel Sky,& more recently the Broken Sword games,including Broken Sword 3 at the moment), who with their Amiga background did a much better job than the earlier U.S. programmed ports.

In the defence of the U.S. programmers,I think it was mainly a legacy of PC led Adventure games,(where hard disk installation was in common usage), that the actual location of the data files on floppy disks didn't seem as important to them. Unfortunately for us, the average single floppy drive Amiga,we'd be driven mad swapping disks in the Leisure Suit Larry games,or Monkey Island etc., all for one or two data files & then forced to swap again 4 or 5 times to load some locations.

Dizzy · 12 August 2003, 04:38

I think we should put the blame on the users, why the **** didn't they buy a harddisk for their amiga, then the company might have continued producing games for the amiga. Peole thought when they bought a 500 they didn't need to buy more hardware.....

gary · 12 August 2003, 06:13

Quote:

I think we should put the blame on the users, why the **** didn't they buy a harddisk for their amiga, then the company might have continued producing games for the amiga.

Thats not fair. Many of us could barely afford an A500 let alone a hard drive. Blame Commodore for not offering a *reasonably* priced hard drive attachment for the low end Amigas, perhaps allowing only using less expensive IDE drives instead of more expensive (but better) SCSI. It wasn't until the A600/A1200 when the low end machines had built in controllers, and even then you only had room for the more expensive 2 1/5 inch drives.

Quote:

Peole thought when they bought a 500 they didn't need to buy more hardware.....

Most software ran fine on a floppy A500 so there wasn't as much incentive as there was in the PC world. Also (sadly) a lot of A500 owners just used it to play floppy games anyway

Shatterhand · 12 August 2003, 07:17

I had heard about C64 games with mini-games while loading.

I never had a C64 so I never saw this. I only used tape on MSX for like 3 months, and no game had this feature.

Yes, I do understand it's hard to make this kind of feature because of technical difficulties, but it's possible to make a mini-game in 1 or 2 kb of memory (That would hardly make much difference in a PS2 game, don't you think?)

The game VS on PSX has a sliding puzzle while loading, and the image on the puzzle is the face of the fighters (An image that's going to be used in the game anyway). It doesn't take even 1kb I guess.

Drake1009 · 12 August 2003, 16:25

The Tape version of Ghost Busters had a mini game along the lines of Amidar to play while the game loaded. So did the tape version of Dizzy Dice, that was a different game, can't quite remember what it was. I think it was a shoot em up typeish game.

I didn't really like the tape version of P.P. Hammer for the C64's loading. I got it for christmas one year. You press play and wait for 5 minutes. Then it asks you too stop the drive, fast forward, stop, play, load some time, stop, rewind, stop, play. Then you get the title screen. Repeat for evey level. After level 32 (not all like the Miggy version) it tried loading on like usual but my version never got further. Might've been a bad tape. The game was mirrored on both sides of the tape. Side A would fail to read level 5 but neither side read level 33.

gary · 13 August 2003, 07:41

Quote:

Then it asks you too stop the drive, fast forward, stop, play, load some time, stop, rewind, stop, play. Then you get the title screen. Repeat for evey level

I think that would mean you had either a bad tape or your tape drive was out of allignment. Be thankful that the program was smart enough to know that there was a problem! Many games simply crashed or even worse - crashed and let the tape run to the end so you think it is still loading!

TikTok · 13 August 2003, 15:33

Road Rash - man, event the demo of this takes ages to load. Christmas Day, just got my Amiga, ripped the packaging off, and had to wait half an hour for the thing to load. And the full game was just as bad. Lucky it wasn't that good so I never loaded it often

.

Dizzy · 13 August 2003, 15:56

Quote:

Originally posted by TikTok
Road Rash - man, event the demo of this takes ages to load. Christmas Day, just got my Amiga, ripped the packaging off, and had to wait half an hour for the thing to load. And the full game was just as bad. Lucky it wasn't that good so I never loaded it often .

YOU *********** Road Rash was one of my all time fav, I got 7 diff version of the game (almost). I don't think it toke ages to load

Drake1009 · 13 August 2003, 18:47

Actually Gary this was apparently supposed to be a copy protection measure. The skips you needed to fast forward and rewind were way too large for this to be an error correction. And you roughly hit the same space on the tape between every level.

Dizzy · 13 August 2003, 21:08

This is nothing compared to the time it takes for the next payday... I dont complain about my wages, the time between them should just be 7 days....

gary · 14 August 2003, 02:04

Quote:

Originally posted by Kodoichi
Not a game, but... Workbench 1.3 took quite a time till it was loaded from a floppy.

The first thing I did with Workbench and many AmigaDOS disks was back them up onto another floppy and OPTIMISE the files (eg: The XCOPY optimise function). This cuts down a LOT of loading time and is especially noticable when loading icons in workbench. I don't understand why so many PD libraries and releases didn't bother doing this? The worst case I saw was one of the PSID disks which had about 100 icons which took about 2 minutes to finish updating the window (takes about 20 seconds after it was optimised).

08 July 2003, 09:46	#49
Tim Janssen Junior Member Join Date: Apr 2001 Location: Den Bosch / The Netherlands Age: 47 Posts: 1,271	C64 loading times... ...are really a cure for people suffering insomnia. I remember I once copied Nebulus on C64 from disc to tape. The datasette-counter stopped at 200 when the game was finally loaded. Taking the pace of the cassette into account (five seconds for 1 counter) the game took a bloody 17 minutes to load! Also, if there is one game which has the longest and most frequent loading times, it is The Software Business' Ooops Up. Unbelievable that such a simple game needs so much disk accessing.

Similar Threads
Thread	Thread Starter	Forum	Replies	Last Post
Amiga going with the times	amiga_Forever	Amiga scene	7	08 October 2012 09:08
ABANDONED TIMES (Issue #2) is out	Zandig	Retrogaming General Discussion	0	02 October 2011 17:12
Stardust loading times?	Cooljerk	support.Games	3	16 September 2011 14:04
Loading times..	Soul_scientist	New to Emulation or Amiga scene	2	16 December 2005 14:41
Polls with start times	Jim	project.EAB	1	09 January 2005 14:40

05 July 2003, 12:31	#43
Wally Registered User Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Newcastle, Australia. Age: 52 Posts: 40	Can't comment on loading times, but I always hated the sound of an Amiga floppy drive. All that grinding noise even on a brand new just out of the box Amiga 500. Anyone who never had a commodore 64 can stop complaining about slow loading. The data cassette was a frigin pain in the arse to use, some of the games took as long as 30 min to load.

05 July 2003, 21:39	#44
andyr Registered User Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: Manchester, UK Posts: 97	Did anyone else actually know how much longer a game had to load from the sounds the floppy drive made? I think I played Superfrog so much that I knew how I long I had to wait from different grinding sounds from the drive! ...or was I just weird? (BTW, that very same drive on my A500 is still working perfectly which is amazing considering the punishment it used to go through and the fact that it's never been cleaned inside!)

06 July 2003, 09:15	#45
haynor666 retro maniac Join Date: May 2002 Location: Tarnobrzeg/Poland Age: 45 Posts: 1,748	Sounds from Body Blows were terrible.

07 July 2003, 19:34	#47
Amiga1992 Registered User Join Date: May 2001 Location: ? Posts: 19,645	Yup, listening to the bar is great too. We are al weirdos maybe It let me diagnose if a disk got fucked up or not, because of the different sounds.

12 August 2003, 04:38	#51
Dizzy Pirate Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Denmark Posts: 3,395	I think we should put the blame on the users, why the **** didn't they buy a harddisk for their amiga, then the company might have continued producing games for the amiga. Peole thought when they bought a 500 they didn't need to buy more hardware.....

12 August 2003, 07:17	#53
Shatterhand Warhasneverbeensomuchfun Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Rio de Janeiro / Brazil Age: 41 Posts: 3,450	I had heard about C64 games with mini-games while loading. I never had a C64 so I never saw this. I only used tape on MSX for like 3 months, and no game had this feature. Yes, I do understand it's hard to make this kind of feature because of technical difficulties, but it's possible to make a mini-game in 1 or 2 kb of memory (That would hardly make much difference in a PS2 game, don't you think?) The game VS on PSX has a sliding puzzle while loading, and the image on the puzzle is the face of the fighters (An image that's going to be used in the game anyway). It doesn't take even 1kb I guess.

12 August 2003, 16:25	#54
Drake1009 Registered User Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: Denmark Posts: 2,284	The Tape version of Ghost Busters had a mini game along the lines of Amidar to play while the game loaded. So did the tape version of Dizzy Dice, that was a different game, can't quite remember what it was. I think it was a shoot em up typeish game. I didn't really like the tape version of P.P. Hammer for the C64's loading. I got it for christmas one year. You press play and wait for 5 minutes. Then it asks you too stop the drive, fast forward, stop, play, load some time, stop, rewind, stop, play. Then you get the title screen. Repeat for evey level. After level 32 (not all like the Miggy version) it tried loading on like usual but my version never got further. Might've been a bad tape. The game was mirrored on both sides of the tape. Side A would fail to read level 5 but neither side read level 33.

13 August 2003, 15:33	#56
TikTok Registered User Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: Malayasia Age: 43 Posts: 657	Road Rash - man, event the demo of this takes ages to load. Christmas Day, just got my Amiga, ripped the packaging off, and had to wait half an hour for the thing to load. And the full game was just as bad. Lucky it wasn't that good so I never loaded it often .

13 August 2003, 18:47	#58
Drake1009 Registered User Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: Denmark Posts: 2,284	Actually Gary this was apparently supposed to be a copy protection measure. The skips you needed to fast forward and rewind were way too large for this to be an error correction. And you roughly hit the same space on the tape between every level.

13 August 2003, 21:08	#59
Dizzy Pirate Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Denmark Posts: 3,395	This is nothing compared to the time it takes for the next payday... I dont complain about my wages, the time between them should just be 7 days....

Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)