The big floppies? Well okay then. Learn something new. Does make you wonder why they only used floppies if tapes were an option as it must have lessened their market.

Floppies loaded a damn sight quicker than tapes. You sat for 5-8 minutes every time you popped a tape into your tapedeck to load a game up. Frustrating was the "97%...ERROR! Please reset and restart the tape."
I could also put 3-7 tape games on a floppy disk for my 171 KiloByte Floppy disk on a Spectrum +3 in the late 80s...depending on how the tapes were "encoded" and their size. (also - double-sided floppies ^_^ ). If the tapes used a special loader configuration, then you couldn't transfer/copy them to a floppy - at least easily, anyway.

I don't think he was talking about the usual tapes but the ones dedicated to data-backup that needed their own drives to operate; those were much faster as floppies and could store more data as well.

Not really - he was replying to Aliasalpha's comments about the Commodore64 - specifically. They had a diskette drive addon, or came with a Commodore tapedeck, not a tape-backup as used on PCs. Games from the mid 80s and older were all on audio tapes (C15-C90s), it was only the later part of that decade where floppy diskettes became available to the home-market.
What an 8-bit game tape sounded like - only there was much more "noise" for most games to load : I think he's got his setup to turbo-compress and load the soundfile.
Now, where did I put my 48k? I suddenly got an urge to go load up Elite again ^_^

Yes, but the machine still only had 64kB memory to throw around. And half of that was used by the OS. The machine could access any sector on a floppy on its own. Not so with a tape. Therefore, even though tapes could hold more data altogether, floppies were the only real choice for games that were too big to fit in the available memory all at once.
A few games that were sequential in nature, meaning that each portion of the game was only acessed once, did come on tapes, but games that revisited the same parts more than once were almost exclusively confined to floppies. There were a (very) few exceptions, but they were extremely annoying to deal with. I remember playing the tape version of California Games once. Changing events was hell. "Please put in side 2 of the tape, rewind to beginning and press play." Then wait forever until the tape happened across the part that contained the event you were trying to switch to.

That's very true. But it would seem to me to be very strange to only release on floppy if you could also milk the far larger cassette market. After all, anyone who's used to the load times of cassettes wouldn't mind so much.

Those things can store far more than a DVD. No it's not those I'm talking about. But rather audio cassettes vs the 8 inch floppies.

Yes, you could copy C64 tape games using an ordinary double audio tape deck. Also, in some parts of the world, certain radio stations occasionally broadcast C64 games and demos. People could then record them on tape from the radio, and load them on their C64 afterwards. I find that an incredibly creative use of technology 8-)

I think you mean 5,25 inch floppies, just to nitpick ;-)

Strip it. It wasn't designed as part of the gameplay for the sake of furthering the story or enhancing the play itself. It was a DRM measure to try to thwart piracy. As such, it has no place in GOG's DRM-free philosophy.

Coelocanth got it right . . . I second his recommendation

Possibly. All I remember was: that fucking drive was huge. Several times the weight of the C64 itself.

The first one was, yes. Some of the later models were much smaller and lighter.

The original Pool of Radiance actually included the code wheel into the game rather than just an initial question prior to launching (i.e. the days of what is X word in Y journal entry?) -- there were a few passwords you have to translate from elven throughout the game (and that's what the code wheel did).

Ah, the 1541. They don't make them like that anymore. Mostly because steam power is considered outdated.

Wow. That's an impressive bit of work!