Atari 1010 Drive??

[A2600]

or any Caseette Drive?? I find these useless now and days sloow loading times and stuff like that when you can probably get the programs on disk anyway!! They r good for looks!! but what else?

[oesii]

I don't think every program is on a disk file, there's some early programs from 1979 or 1980 when the Atari 8-bits came out that are tape only and alot of programs were still being released in Europe on tape well into the 80's because it was a lot cheaper to have a data recorder than a disk drive.

 

My personal favorite applications for the tape drive that you can't replicate on disk drives are the foreign language tapes. I've got German, Spanish, and French. I need to get Italian some day

[svenski]

 

The Atari 1010 is considered the most reliable of the Atari cassette units.

 

A large amount of titles were released only on cassette and as oesii said, the 1010 is great for things like the Atari Conversational Language programs.

 

These programs actually play sound whilst loading in the background so you can be listening to Spanish whilst the next lesson loads.

 

Also, with the Atari tape units you can write a simple program that turns your Atari into a virtual disco, displaying different colors or graphics based on the sounds being inputted via the tape unit.

[+rdemming]

 

 

The Atari 1010 is considered the most reliable of the Atari cassette units.

 

 

Except that the push buttons have the habit to break. I already had to repair a button on two 1010 devices.

 

Robert

[Curt Vendel]

or any Caseette Drive?? I find these useless now and days sloow loading times and stuff like that when you can probably get the programs on disk anyway!! They r good for looks!! but what else?

 

Try the Atari Educational Series and Foreign Language series...

 

 

Something not widely known about the Atari cassette drives is they are a dual track system and can play an audio track while loading data in the background. This was a wonderful system for teaching tools that included audio, the Foreign Language series took full advantage of this and even such programs as the original Atari Word Processor which came with a tutorial had audio prompts and cues, its was a superb system, but never really marketed strongly.

 

 

Curt

[A2600]

But what if...if you dont own these tapes

[+Sauron]

But what if...if you dont own these tapes

 

...then you still own a nice little piece of Atari history, as well as another method of backing up data. I wouldn't label it as totally useless quite so quickly.

[video game addict]

While we're on the subject....

 

What are the must have tape games for the Atari 8-bits?

 

 

Educational & Foreign Language series aside, let's talk about the games!

 

I've only been into the 8-bit scene for about a year and a half, and just recently purchased my first Atari tape drive the same 1010 as mentioned above. I have only two cassette games in my collection, Megalegs, a Centipede rip-off, and Super Cubes & Slip, a suprisingly cool looking Rubik's Cube game, very similar to the new Rubik's Cube 3D, but with better graphics, and a labyrinth type game on the flip side that didn't hold my attention long.

 

So...I'm looking for recommendations for cassette games that weren't available on cart. Any good original tape games out there?

[Curt Vendel]

Scram: Nuclear Power Plant Simulation is pretty cool, so is Kingdom. Space Invaders was sold on Cassette by Atari early on too...

 

 

These are some interesting (Atari) games.

 

 

Curt

[+davidcalgary29]

While we're on the subject....

 

What are the must have tape games for the Atari 8-bits?

 

 

Educational & Foreign Language series aside, let's talk about the games!

 

I've only been into the 8-bit scene for about a year and a half, and just recently purchased my first Atari tape drive the same 1010 as mentioned above.  I have only two cassette games in my collection, Megalegs, a Centipede rip-off, and Super Cubes & Slip, a suprisingly cool looking Rubik's Cube game, very similar to the new Rubik's Cube 3D, but with better graphics, and a labyrinth type game on the flip side that didn't hold my attention long.

 

So...I'm looking for recommendations for cassette games that weren't available on cart. Any good original tape games out there?

 

I have a complete set of educational tapes (math, geography, and history) that my father bought me to use with my 800 back in '83. This isn't a game, but I love the fact that you can hear a crystal-clear audio track while the program is loading.

 

Must-have game: Zaxxon. It takes forever to load, though.

[video game addict]

I have Zaxxon on cart, was there any difference? Besides for the fact that mine loads instantly. Really would like to see lists of good tape games, that weren't available on carts.

 

Also do PAL tapes load correctly on a NTSC setup?

[+davidcalgary29]

There's no real differences between the tape, cart, and disk versions of Zaxxon; the tape may have an earlier version of the game, but I doubt it.

 

You're not likely to find many NTSC good tape games that aren't text adventures or the like; the market really died out in North America by '83 or so.

 

Many PAL tape games won't work on NTSC machines, of course, but I've had good success with latter-day games from Mastertronic.

[svenski]

 

There are *tons* of titles available on tape, most of which were not released in the US.

 

Classic titles from Zeppeling include Fantastic Soccer, Blinky's Scary School, Draconus, Phantom and more.

 

Then you have all the Mastertronic titles, most of which were written by UK programmers during their school lunch hour (perhaps). Other UK publishers were English, Byte Back, Atlantis, Blue Ribbon (they called themselves 'Blue Ribbon' because the software was utter shite) and probably loads more, like ooh Firebird (Warhawk, Druid)... there must be more...

 

In the US Cosmi released many of their early 400/800 titles (like Caverns of Khafka) on cassette.

 

After the release of the XEGS Atari UK released several new titles on cassette - just can't remember them.

 

As for if they play, it depends on the game really but many modern tvs will handle PAL .

 

At the end of the day the world won't end if you don't play cassette games or throw your datacorder in the bin. You just can't beat putting in a tape, going downstairs to watch the latest episode of 'Friends' only to find that by the time its finished, the game has almost finished loading.