Commodore 64 Games in Europe

[Great Hierophant]

I wanted to see the games with the music that had so captivated C64 gamers back in the day (the ones with individual HVSID subdirectories.) So, after downloading all the .d64 files in TOSEC, I asked why every almost every single game seemed to be cracked, i.e. no original disks. (US companies, like Electronic Arts, Origin, SSI, Sierra, etc. are the exceptions.) Then, having loooked at some of these games, it finally dawned on me, they all came on cassette tapes! Thats why I could not hear some of the best tunes, they were composed while the player waited for his game to load. What I had really got were a bunch of converted cracks and trainers. It seems that the best composers worked for companies that used cassette tapes, not disks as their major storage medium. Why tapes and not disks? Do tapes load faster than disks? Not really. Were disks much more expensive than tapes? Probably not, but that cost could be passed onto the consumer. Was the disk drive too expensive for Europeans, who could use a readily available cassette player? Could be. Perhaps the inferior Sinclair machines, without any good disk drive, poisoned the market into a dislike of disks at the 8-bit level.

[YOK-dfa]

Not sure what your question is, but i do know that almost all the games for the c64 were available as a cassette or disk version. The disk version being the more expensive one. (don't know why). Also, most people i knew from that time all had diskdrives. Cassette games had horrible loading times and were cumbersome in use...

 

I guess the reason why you only see cracked versions is that all games (both cassette and disk) had copy protection. To obtain a rom image, or binary image you have to have the cracked version. I guess that's why you don't see much original games. They simply don't work with emulators. I highly doubt if original games would work nowadays on a real C64. Audio tapes and disk are not good media for long term data storage...

 

 

Cheers,

Raymond

[Mayhem]

Well let's narrow it down even more... most of the prominant C64 composers were British. Most C64 owners in the UK only had tape drives because of Commodore's stupid pricing policy. Hence companies here predominantly released their games on tape. Most were also released on disk but sales were quite low in comparison.

 

Hence to bypass the time waiting for it to load, many games had music. Some of which was unique to the title in question.

 

The point is also that in general, games were far easier to crack from tape medium than disk medium. This is from talking to many members of various cracking groups past and present. Hence a lot of images on the net were originally tape orientated instead. Obviously they had to crack a game from disk if it was only released in that format (mainly RPGs).

 

You can't easily transfer original disks to emulator format 95% of the time because of the copy protections used by companies to prevent copying in the first place. You can 6pak, G64 it, or parallel transfer, but many times, breaking the protection and producing a "cracked" version was the only way to get a 100% running emulator version.

[LeeT]

As Mayhem said, Commodore priced the disk drive at a ridiculously high price in the uk, therefore more people bought tape units, meaning the games were widely availible on cassette with disks usually on mail order.

 

There are sites where you can download plenty of TAP files...

[Saikyo]

thing that did my head in was i get a new game second hand get it home

and get this stupid scrolly similar to this!

 

==HI AND WELCOME TO THE NEWEST RELEASE FROM SUPER PIRATES!==

GREETS GO OUT Etc...

 

and boy did i throw them away or did i throw them away!

[Ze_ro]

Almost all the D64 images you find will be cracked versions, and unfortunately, there isn't any really good way around that. A lot of C64 games were copy protected due to rampant piracy... usually, this copy protection involved disks with intentional errors on them, which you couldn't really copy back in the days. D64 images are also incapable of holding the error information and such that the games looked for. The vast majority (all?) of games out there have since been cracked though, which bypasses all the error checks and such and lets you copy the game (As well as make a working D64 out of it). The crappy part though, is that in the process of cracking the games, they usually had to remove whatever fastloaders the game had. This isn't that big a deal on emulators, but the speed difference was HUGE on an actual C64. Plus, they always slapped their their intro on it... they sometimes even added a trainer too.

 

The only way I know of to get around this is to use a program like mnib to get a full GCR image of a disk (Known as a G64 image). These images CAN contain all the necessary error information to make the copy protection work... however, they're much larger, and aside from VICE, I'm not sure many emulators even support them. Plus, you probably won't find a lot of G64 images out there, so you're stuck with cracks.

 

As far as I know, no cracking team ever took the music out of a game though. Once you get past the crack intro and the load speed, the game should play identically to the original... if that's not the case, then you probably got a bad crack.

 

--Zero

[Mayhem]

D64 images are also incapable of holding the error information and such that the games looked for.

 

Not necessarily true, it depends on the errors. If you transfer over a disk using StarCom and encounter the standard read error tracks, you can save them to an "error block" in the D64 and quite often this is good enough to fool the program when loading in the emulator. I've done quite a few of my originals like this to perfectly work in CCS/Vice.

 

The crappy part though, is that in the process of cracking the games, they usually had to remove whatever fastloaders the game had.

 

Though a lot of the time they then put in their own fastloader

[Ze_ro]

The crappy part though, is that in the process of cracking the games, they usually had to remove whatever fastloaders the game had.

 

Though a lot of the time they then put in their own fastloader

 

Well, I haven't seen that happen terribly often... most of the cracking groups seemed to be more concerned with being the first to release a specific game than actually doing the best crack. Sadly, this is a trend that still continues with cracking groups today.

 

Some of the more recent cracks (ie, done within the last year or two) have been truly excellent though. Leave it to the hardcore fans of the system to do stuff like this properly.

 

--Zero

[Great Hierophant]

As far as I know, no cracking team ever took the music out of a game though

 

What about tape games that played a loading tune while the game loads?