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6/17/2025, 7:54:27 PM
>>11806865
European computers had a weakness related to storage media. 90% of games came on audio cassettes, which meant that software had to be loaded in one chunk before starting the game and the whole code had to reside inside computer's RAM. You could theoretically create software which would ask for additional loads afterwards, but everybody hated that since it often required rewinding tape and was generally unreliable. Meanwhile, floppy disks could load arbitrary data into RAM at any point of operation and cartridges were exposing their whole contents at all times, making much more complex games possible.
There were actually 10 games for ZX Spectrum released back then on ROM cartridge, taking advantage of the ZX Interface 2 addon device, but the whole format flopped and the carts were limited to only 16KiB of data anyway.
European computers had a weakness related to storage media. 90% of games came on audio cassettes, which meant that software had to be loaded in one chunk before starting the game and the whole code had to reside inside computer's RAM. You could theoretically create software which would ask for additional loads afterwards, but everybody hated that since it often required rewinding tape and was generally unreliable. Meanwhile, floppy disks could load arbitrary data into RAM at any point of operation and cartridges were exposing their whole contents at all times, making much more complex games possible.
There were actually 10 games for ZX Spectrum released back then on ROM cartridge, taking advantage of the ZX Interface 2 addon device, but the whole format flopped and the carts were limited to only 16KiB of data anyway.
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