Loading from tape

After some time off-line due to a disk failure, the CPCWiki Forum is back online. There is a thread to “show off your Amstrads”, so I used the excuse to do some gaming with the kids and my 464. Also I was talking to one of them the other day about cassettes, how long the games took to load, and how we had “compilation” cassettes with several games on them. So we decided to load the games from tape! Vanity shot: loading The Return of Traxtor My younger son suggested that we should start loading one of my games, and that was The Return of Traxtor. The game was pubished some years ago by Matra in jewel case with the ZX Spectrum version on one side, and this Amstrad CPC version on the other one. It did load first time, with no issues, despite the age of the built-in tape drive. It was fun, and the kids realised that some games took quite some time to load. For example, “The Trap Door” (based on the animated series of the same name), is about 7 minutes of tape. It felt much longer to them!…