They were, just watching these games load alone was enough. The skill, imagination and programming ingenuity is all to see here. Forty years on and I STILL love the Spectrum.
" Nobody wants to watch an hour long video :-)." Yes we DO WANT to watch for an hour long video!. That's what it was all about back in the days! The loading part was better than the game part itself for most of them
Kids these days will NEVER experience the excitement we felt when we waited, with baited breath, for the latest elease to load..Only to be met with "R Tape loading error".
I made loads of different loading routines on the a spectrum when I was about 18yrs back in 80 , & some have been demonstrated in this video. Thanks for ghr video.
How did people like you make custom loaders though? I can't find anything anywhere about how to create them, and some of them are so clever. Any explanation would be great!
@@timt398 I didn't know anything about assembly language or programming at the time, I just used a loader from a game, disassembled it and messed around with the out command.
@@timt398 A lot of the early ones were just variations of the Rom loading routines with some addendums. The usual one being changing the border load colours as well as messing with the timings. ones like Speedlock added Encryption of the code and eventually 128k support. and of course Alkatraz, which is the one where many of the fancy picture loaders come from. Never wrote one myself, but i did hack them for a bit to copy them to my Speccy +3, as I didn't have the money for a Multiface, and the +3 disk versions of software were ridiculously more expensive than tape. Managed to hack the most of the speedlocks and the simpler loaders by myself. For Alkatraz, Speedlock 7 and a few others, i actually relied on the hacks printed in YS by the legend that was Jon North. It was usually pretty simple to figure out where the actual hack was in the Data statements and replace it with code which immediately called the block save routine at 04c2. (Meant having a second tape recorder plugged in that you started recording before the load ended.) Ah, happy days :)
I started to write a Space Invaders clone as a loading game after seeing this on the c64. I'd mapped out all the opcode timings but needed to handle variations in how long the games was taking depending on key presses altering the program flow. But I never got round to finishing this before heading to uni in the 90s. I had assumed nobody had done this, so I'm quite shocked, disappointed but also kinda glad somebody finally did in Joe Blade II
@@damionyates4946 YES i asked my mate to do similar on his next title ......a game one could play whilst loading .... then a minigame that was in memory reserved for level loading 'multiload like gaunlet !! one could only play it once,,,,,wen game was initiated it was deleted !!
Thank you for this, it is an absolute delight! Coming from the ex-USSR where most of the speccy games were packed on bootleg cassettes by the dozen, with "cracked by Bill Gilbert" logos and simple loaders easy to break and put your pokes in, this was amazing to see how the games had been loaded in the world without the crappiest audio cassettes and poorest of the recorders!
I still hear the loading sounds clearly in my head after all these years. Great video thanks, love the countdown examples, just shows what could be achieved.
Brilliant - at 14:04 (Flying Shark), that's Bleepload, which I like the sound of, for some reason. Lovely to hear it again. Also on my favourite game of all time, Bubble Bobble. I still play it now, 38 years later. With my children.
@@ChannelReuploads9451That's fascinating, and yes it does, if a "block" (256 bytes I think), loaded badly, you could just rewind the tape and try that "part" of the tape again. 👍
I am not proud to say that the combination of turbo loader + custom colours scared the hell out of my very impressionable young mind. To me, it meant that anything was possible and that I was losing what little control I had over my spectrum.
Finally someone did this...was thinking about doing it but going through thousands of zx spectrum games blindly...I thank thee for doin' the needful :D
"Some of tape blocks and image loading sequences in the video are truncated. Nobody wants to watch an hour long video." Man, this video is awesome (I felt asleep a few times and had to watch it from the beginning). :)
I used to make loading screens that build up like this on the 48K - To generate the data - you record the starting point offset of the squares location (2 bytes) - followed by 8 bytes for the squares data. Then save this byte sequence all to tape - so the image actually takes longer to load than a regular screen$ - But you can omit any squares with no image. I used a basic language program that let you move a cursor around the screen and mark off positions. A custom machine code version of the normal loading code from rom, reads 2 byte address from tape, and places the next 8 bytes at that squares location as they come in from tape... While loading of course its not loading the real game data - but having the screen is worth it as it makes it seem quicker. I tried doing fast loaders - but my tapes and tape recorders were not very high quality and it caused me to loose a days work on a game I was making so ditched fast saving from then. The trick where you remove Program: is done easily - you use a special character in the loading name which allows the next 2 characters to be the x and y position to print the next characters - you set the y and x to print the next characters over the "Program:" that the rom routine displays. This means the name has to be short as there is a small limit on the characters allowed in total. made a speedloader for the +3 disk when I eventually for one of them- the Amstrad had so much error checking and memory swopping in it, the built in load from disk was nearly 3 times slower than it needed to be...
Academy Tau Ceti 2 had awesome loader too - a flashing triangle indicator. With modern loading times (even with SSD), they might as well bring this art back.
"Nobody wants to watch an hour long video". Um, I would :-D It was always great to buy a new Speccy game and hear those high pitched tones of a custom loader when you first played the tape. Some of them were phenomenal.
Who remembers the loader of the game Underwurlde, very high sound while loading that give many users a headache because it sometimes didn't load well..
Trashman - loving the Spaceballs reference! I really enjoyed this video, for one its made me realise that im not alone in liking the strange noises that represented the spectrum loading software and secondly its made me realise that im not alone in liking the strange noises that represented the spectrum loading software. Now i know technically thats the same point but I really did think i was alone
fun tip put an old car cassette adapter into your Spectrum cassette player and plug the jack lead into the headphone socket on your phone. it will load the games in this video.
Theoretically, yes. In practice, RUclips's audio compression tends to filter out a lot of the white noise that the Spectrum actually needs to load games successfully.
Those games that loaded with turbo were very difficult to copy from tape recorder to tape recorder and there were quite expensive for our budgets, 20 usd or so, not inflation adjusted.
Think back to when you were in secondary school in late 70s and early 80s and the "high speed" dot matrix printer that schools had. Now think of the spectrum loading sound. Bingo.
I thought I'd never say this, but how I miss that annoying noise and intros whatever they wanted to be. I can see it was Alien technology in those times. Thank you nerds for making our childhood a bit better. 😢
I'll be honest, when these custom loads started coming out I thought the software was faulty. I remember taking Uridium back to WHSmiths telling them there was something wrong with it. Eventually I learned to leave the tape running!
I always wonderd why they didnt use things like half wave loaders back in the day - I suspect it might have to do with tape fidelity vs frequency content (half waves give a signal closer to white noise with less specific tones). Some of those examples do seem to be pushing frequency limits though.
This is great, and this sort of thing always interested me. Are all of these original as the tapes were sold at the time, or are these adaptations using utilities? I know this some of this sort of thing did start to happen from around 1986, with Alcatraz loading, Top Gun, Mailstrom, Bobby Bearing, etc, and the countdowns started to become a thing. Some of what's in this video look to be from a couple of earlier games(?) I drifted off the Spectrum by 1987. With some of the loading screens, it beats me how a largely full screen gets produced from quite short blocks of code, compared to the old 6,912 bytes of a normal screen.
I have a question: In this video, is the monitor you're using supposed to have rounded corners, or is this specifically a known (programmed in) effect of the software?? I'd like to know because I'm interested in seeing what can be done with regards to the BORDER area of the screen.
I tried making a custom loader back when I had my +3 in the early 90s, it would load a single screen line from a file at a time in a single top to bottom sequence, that was until the silly limitation of the +3s drive prevented it from working :(
Although these loaders were fun to watch (especially when they kept loading different graphics and text), they actually made the game SLOWER to load. All the times it's loading the extra stuff to display it's not actually loading game data into memory!
They weren't necessarily slower. The ones that just rearrange the loading order (eg attrs first, then image backwards) have the same speed. The "directed drawing" load can be even faster if it skips the blank areas. And many of them were combined with turbo loaders that can be about 2 times faster. Today's OTLA or K7zx loaders can be even faster, though they expect a good quality modern sound source rather than a tape that would just cause loading errors.
Местами много лишнего кода :) взять тот же Rescue - весь машинный код был вшит в нулевую строку REM, а потом грузился один огромный файл, который начинался где-то с начала экранной области )))
I've never seen the ERBE release of Cobra. Completely different loader. I perfer the original loader though where the loading screen is showing up like some other loaders in this video.
По сути в те времена нужно было быть и программером, и электронщиком одновременно. Или как минимум хорошо знать аппаратную часть компьютера, помимо самого умения кодить
I doubt I would have had much luck trying to make a copy.... sorry I mean back-up.... of any of these games using 'The Key' (ruclips.net/video/QQQWXRY593I/видео.html)
![In Color by Darklite and Offence [zx spectrum 128]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/jwyZBCo6Irc/mqdefault.jpg)
ZX loaders were the ART!
They were, just watching these games load alone was enough. The skill, imagination and programming ingenuity is all to see here. Forty years on and I STILL love the Spectrum.
" Nobody wants to watch an hour long video :-)." Yes we DO WANT to watch for an hour long video!. That's what it was all about back in the days! The loading part was better than the game part itself for most of them
Real
Right like what tf man. I know what I clicked on.
@ninjaalex-yf5io Even on emulators, i still switch to actual tape loading, non of this instant load malarky.
Kids these days will NEVER experience the excitement we felt when we waited, with baited breath, for the latest elease to load..Only to be met with "R Tape loading error".
Rand usr 1333
OR THE INEVITABLE CRASH AT THE VERY END ....GRRRRRRR
This is brilliant..... After staring at standard loading systems for years in the 80s...anything unusual or clever was a blessing
I made loads of different loading routines on the a spectrum when I was about 18yrs back in 80 , & some have been demonstrated in this video. Thanks for ghr video.
How did people like you make custom loaders though? I can't find anything anywhere about how to create them, and some of them are so clever. Any explanation would be great!
@@timt398 I didn't know anything about assembly language or programming at the time, I just used a loader from a game, disassembled it and messed around with the out command.
@@timt398 A lot of the early ones were just variations of the Rom loading routines with some addendums. The usual one being changing the border load colours as well as messing with the timings. ones like Speedlock added Encryption of the code and eventually 128k support. and of course Alkatraz, which is the one where many of the fancy picture loaders come from.
Never wrote one myself, but i did hack them for a bit to copy them to my Speccy +3, as I didn't have the money for a Multiface, and the +3 disk versions of software were ridiculously more expensive than tape.
Managed to hack the most of the speedlocks and the simpler loaders by myself. For Alkatraz, Speedlock 7 and a few others, i actually relied on the hacks printed in YS by the legend that was Jon North. It was usually pretty simple to figure out where the actual hack was in the Data statements and replace it with code which immediately called the block save routine at 04c2. (Meant having a second tape recorder plugged in that you started recording before the load ended.)
Ah, happy days :)
I started to write a Space Invaders clone as a loading game after seeing this on the c64. I'd mapped out all the opcode timings but needed to handle variations in how long the games was taking depending on key presses altering the program flow. But I never got round to finishing this before heading to uni in the 90s. I had assumed nobody had done this, so I'm quite shocked, disappointed but also kinda glad somebody finally did in Joe Blade II
@@damionyates4946 YES i asked my mate to do similar on his next title ......a game one could play whilst loading .... then a minigame that was in memory reserved for level loading 'multiload like gaunlet !! one could only play it once,,,,,wen game was initiated it was deleted !!
Thank you for this, it is an absolute delight! Coming from the ex-USSR where most of the speccy games were packed on bootleg cassettes by the dozen, with "cracked by Bill Gilbert" logos and simple loaders easy to break and put your pokes in, this was amazing to see how the games had been loaded in the world without the crappiest audio cassettes and poorest of the recorders!
I still hear the loading sounds clearly in my head after all these years. Great video thanks, love the countdown examples, just shows what could be achieved.
Brilliant - at 14:04 (Flying Shark), that's Bleepload, which I like the sound of, for some reason. Lovely to hear it again. Also on my favourite game of all time, Bubble Bobble. I still play it now, 38 years later. With my children.
Firebird Software (British Telecom) made the loading scheme, they made it to mimick the BBC Micro loading style.
@@ChannelReuploads9451That's fascinating, and yes it does, if a "block" (256 bytes I think), loaded badly, you could just rewind the tape and try that "part" of the tape again. 👍
I am not proud to say that the combination of turbo loader + custom colours scared the hell out of my very impressionable young mind. To me, it meant that anything was possible and that I was losing what little control I had over my spectrum.
I mean, that’s some black magic stuff so it’s completely understandable
Finally someone did this...was thinking about doing it but going through thousands of zx spectrum games blindly...I thank thee for doin' the needful :D
"Some of tape blocks and image loading sequences in the video are truncated. Nobody wants to watch an hour long video." Man, this video is awesome (I felt asleep a few times and had to watch it from the beginning). :)
Ah yes, the Joe Blade 2 'play pacman whilst it's loading' loader at 17:37.
That was like pure witchcraft at the time.
It's still for me...
Hard to describe the nostalgic excitement that tape loading brings. It was frustrating at the time mind you!
Annoyance turned art, genius programming
I used to make loading screens that build up like this on the 48K - To generate the data - you record the starting point offset of the squares location (2 bytes) - followed by 8 bytes for the squares data. Then save this byte sequence all to tape - so the image actually takes longer to load than a regular screen$ - But you can omit any squares with no image. I used a basic language program that let you move a cursor around the screen and mark off positions. A custom machine code version of the normal loading code from rom, reads 2 byte address from tape, and places the next 8 bytes at that squares location as they come in from tape...
While loading of course its not loading the real game data - but having the screen is worth it as it makes it seem quicker.
I tried doing fast loaders - but my tapes and tape recorders were not very high quality and it caused me to loose a days work on a game I was making so ditched fast saving from then.
The trick where you remove Program: is done easily - you use a special character in the loading name which allows the next 2 characters to be the x and y position to print the next characters - you set the y and x to print the next characters over the "Program:" that the rom routine displays. This means the name has to be short as there is a small limit on the characters allowed in total.
made a speedloader for the +3 disk when I eventually for one of them- the Amstrad had so much error checking and memory swopping in it, the built in load from disk was nearly 3 times slower than it needed to be...
One of the best videos on youtube!
Academy Tau Ceti 2 had awesome loader too - a flashing triangle indicator.
With modern loading times (even with SSD), they might as well bring this art back.
Nothing better to do in life this one uploaded this
It must have been a titanic effort to put together such a great collection
"Nobody wants to watch an hour long video". Um, I would :-D It was always great to buy a new Speccy game and hear those high pitched tones of a custom loader when you first played the tape. Some of them were phenomenal.
Cracked by Bill Gilbert💛💙
Hexadecimal loader was my personal favourite ( the sentinel ) was great cause you could rewind a bit if it stopped loading . Brilliant 👍
I used to be able to tell what game was loading just by their sound alone for quite a few games, still can for Doomdarks Revenge.
Spectrum like a boss, as always!
Поражался всеми этими нагрузками,но де дай бог кто-то свет включит или выключит)) или холодильник гребаный сработает))))))
Awesome video. :) It really takes me back to the epoch when I was happy playing with the ZX Spectrum 48k. :)
Thank you for publishing this. :)
Who remembers the loader of the game Underwurlde, very high sound while loading that give many users a headache because it sometimes didn't load well..
Trashman - loving the Spaceballs reference! I really enjoyed this video, for one its made me realise that im not alone in liking the strange noises that represented the spectrum loading software and secondly its made me realise that im not alone in liking the strange noises that represented the spectrum loading software. Now i know technically thats the same point but I really did think i was alone
fun tip
put an old car cassette adapter into your Spectrum cassette player and plug the jack lead into the headphone socket on your phone. it will load the games in this video.
Theoretically, yes. In practice, RUclips's audio compression tends to filter out a lot of the white noise that the Spectrum actually needs to load games successfully.
@@gwishart I managed it with Robocop once
Theoretically no it wouldn't. You would get R tape loading error incomplete data lol
Black Arrow is probably the coolest - the loading sounds are the full graphics.
Lovely sound. But what they made with the simple loading routine is amazing
Bought back so many memories of "R: Tape Loading Error" after spending all night copying games from friends.....
Культура прошлой цивилизации.
Some classics on there mate, loved Trapdoor and Cobra especially. Mint!
Great collection you put together.
Those games that loaded with turbo were very difficult to copy from tape recorder to tape recorder and there were quite expensive for our budgets, 20 usd or so, not inflation adjusted.
The fun I had creating loading effects on the spectrum. Can get some funky effects.
Wow! That was really great!
This is Art !
Think back to when you were in secondary school in late 70s and early 80s and the "high speed" dot matrix printer that schools had. Now think of the spectrum loading sound.
Bingo.
I thought I'd never say this, but how I miss that annoying noise and intros whatever they wanted to be. I can see it was Alien technology in those times. Thank you nerds for making our childhood a bit better. 😢
wow
Amazing of custom loaders on Spectrum! 👍 I’m interesting with C64 and Amstrad has different loaders!
Invader load on the c64 was great. Play space invaders while the game loads.
Thank you very much for causing me flashback! :D
I can't be bothered with this any more... I watched it at x2 speed 😂
Put it at 0.25 speed for ASMR 🤪
7:15 So amazing
Помню,Ка долго загружались эти игры!Мне всегда не хватало терпения!😂
Where Bill Gilbert ?)))
😂😂😂
Надо что-бы автор на 1 час снял загрузки Bill Gilbert 😅
AFAIR 'Academy' also has non-standard loader.
I'll be honest, when these custom loads started coming out I thought the software was faulty. I remember taking Uridium back to WHSmiths telling them there was something wrong with it. Eventually I learned to leave the tape running!
I remember adjusting the screw on the cassette heads to stop the games crashing on loading. they could be tempremental
I used to do the same, it would help with copied games load far more easier etc.
Now somebody could finally break down how it works in details with code examples!
I was near 12 years old and learned assembler 5 years later on PC...
I always wonderd why they didnt use things like half wave loaders back in the day - I suspect it might have to do with tape fidelity vs frequency content (half waves give a signal closer to white noise with less specific tones). Some of those examples do seem to be pushing frequency limits though.
This is great, and this sort of thing always interested me. Are all of these original as the tapes were sold at the time, or are these adaptations using utilities? I know this some of this sort of thing did start to happen from around 1986, with Alcatraz loading, Top Gun, Mailstrom, Bobby Bearing, etc, and the countdowns started to become a thing.
Some of what's in this video look to be from a couple of earlier games(?) I drifted off the Spectrum by 1987.
With some of the loading screens, it beats me how a largely full screen gets produced from quite short blocks of code, compared to the old 6,912 bytes of a normal screen.
It's music to my ears!
I have a question:
In this video, is the monitor you're using supposed to have rounded corners, or is this specifically a known (programmed in) effect of the software??
I'd like to know because I'm interested in seeing what can be done with regards to the BORDER area of the screen.
And not an 'R' tape loading error to be spotted anywhere.
I remember there were some pokes that would make the border look like a weird loading pattern.
Custom loaders a brilliant the memories
I tried making a custom loader back when I had my +3 in the early 90s, it would load a single screen line from a file at a time in a single top to bottom sequence, that was until the silly limitation of the +3s drive prevented it from working :(
Although these loaders were fun to watch (especially when they kept loading different graphics and text), they actually made the game SLOWER to load. All the times it's loading the extra stuff to display it's not actually loading game data into memory!
Manic Miner was good for that reason; it was just a few colour attributes and no pixels.
They weren't necessarily slower. The ones that just rearrange the loading order (eg attrs first, then image backwards) have the same speed. The "directed drawing" load can be even faster if it skips the blank areas. And many of them were combined with turbo loaders that can be about 2 times faster. Today's OTLA or K7zx loaders can be even faster, though they expect a good quality modern sound source rather than a tape that would just cause loading errors.
Higher budget game publisher for games on zx spectrum will used either speedlock or alcatraz loader
Местами много лишнего кода :) взять тот же Rescue - весь машинный код был вшит в нулевую строку REM, а потом грузился один огромный файл, который начинался где-то с начала экранной области )))
Красотень !!!
Very Nice!
ZX Spectrum Speedlock 5 14:58
This is greate. Thank You
I've never seen the ERBE release of Cobra. Completely different loader. I perfer the original loader though where the loading screen is showing up like some other loaders in this video.
I can't escape my own Alkatraz.
Hands up, if you POKED a RET 0 into the machine code, so the fastloader returned to Basic (and was saveable as a regular file) when it was done!
That is turbo loading. I still can recognize it
One question through the years... HOW?
Oooooooooop Chk! Ooooooooooooooooop Chklklklklklklklk!
The sound of my childhood.
How did you do this? 38 years later and still is a mystery to me
21:28 elite loader
Amazing.
Great video.. Just missing Heavy on the magic? :)
❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
Alkatraz 4 life :-)
I came back 30 years ago
А где VINDICATOR?
Cool!
5:49 😂
cool
Hardcore 12:57 námrd pičo The way webdo love
I wasted the best years of my youth listening to these noises..
they could have done a wee tune
missing zakzam :)
You forgot Astro Marine Corps, which includes a game while loading
You missed out Jasper
Да уж, как мозги у программеров работали, диву даешься!
По сути в те времена нужно было быть и программером, и электронщиком одновременно. Или как минимум хорошо знать аппаратную часть компьютера, помимо самого умения кодить
:O 18:19
Turbo and anticopy
Jumpin jack never worked properly tbh , so many tries ….
Cooooool-cool-cool-cool-cool-cool!
У krackout и academy ещё прикольные загрузчики были, но визуально попроще, чем здесь представлены.
I doubt I would have had much luck trying to make a copy.... sorry I mean back-up.... of any of these games using 'The Key' (ruclips.net/video/QQQWXRY593I/видео.html)
I don't think The Key could even do headerless loaders, let alone the fancier turbo/encrypted loaders.
Too loud! Atari 8bit with Atari 1010 and XC12 recorder are the best.
Locomotion's puzzle is fake! You can just stop the tape right then and resume from next block when puzzle is done.
Yes. I knew it when I was oreating the video. Anyway, it look cool 😁
Whatever become of the hackers who wrote these gems?
I'm nobody. :-(