Were there any games on Tape?

[MADrigal]

There were heaps of games on cassette!
Some were produced by VTech directly (very rare findings - and they were mostly utilities)
Many others were made in Australia and branded Dick Smith Electronics. Most games not difficult to find but a couple are really very rare
And then there are books of programs, also sold by Dick Smith Electronics, containing listings written mostly by young Australian programmers at the time
You can download all listings from: https://www.madrigaldesign.it/creativemu/basic.php
Scanned books from: https://www.madrigaldesign.it/creativemu/books.php
Audio file recordings (WAV) of cassette games: https://www.madrigaldesign.it/creativemu ... .php#tape1
And NO the cassette games were definitely not as good as the cartridge games. For a reason: the cassettes contained games written in BASIC and the CreatiVision BASIC is notoriously crap, slow and does not allow the use of sprites. You can only play with character sets and very simple music tunes, this limits greatly the quality of the programs. And it is TERRIBLY slow!

[cheshirenoir]

Oh yeah,
On the subject of BASIC being slow... I ran a test of a little test program developed by Noel of "Noel's Retro Lab" and the VTech BASIC was the third slowest on record. The only things that were even in the same ballpark were those hand held "computers" that looked like long calculators that were popular for a bit in the early 80s. Every other "real" computer was at least twice as fast.

Chesh

[MADrigal]

I believe BASIC executes 1 command per Vsync cycle - that is 50 commands per second, no matter how complex the command is. Which makes it extremely slow, even to just declare a variable value.

[LennonNZ]

Finally got some tapes today. Had 3 copies of the demo one already but this time got others.

IMG_0764.jpeg

Missing some sleeves

[Mobsie]

Also the fact that the basic stores the program in vram makes it terrible slow.