Ninja Commando on the Atari 800:
You could just copy the cassette tape to another and eventually we knew someone that could copy the huge floppy discs which was awesome at the time!
Oh GOD tape drives. I had one for my C64 and my dad got me a phone book sized book of basic coding for games, like night driver, pong, snake, etc.Cassettes were neat, especially when you had multiple games on one tape. You had to wind to the correct place on the tape (which you could tell by checking the counter), then load until it reached the end point (each game had the "length" noted on the case) and stop the loading manually because the player didn't have any automatic end of file recognition
And everything took so..... long............. to................. load......................
A local radio show used to broadcast computer programs that you could tape and then load and run
"And now, an hour of screeching noises. Remember to press 'record' at the tone, and stop recording at the exit tone."
My first pirated games were Moon Patrol and the original Mario Bros. (before they were super) and Number Munchers on an Apple ][. What was funny was I had classes and each had one game or the other. I figured out how to copy the floppies and had to where each class had a copy of each game for each machine. That was in like 2nd grade.
