Its a good thing the Vic 20 was so awesome that the game sold themselves. Because as spokesthings go, the Mime is somewhere below rapping shoe insert. I see absolutely no reason for UMI (which made some decent games) to use this mime, none of the games in the ad are clown related that I can see and this ad was out well after the Shields and Yarnell craze. Its a real head-scratcher.
It’s funny… you could give me a C-64 disc, and I’d crack that sucker within minutes. Simple disc redirection routines. Give me a HES or UMI tape on the VIC-20, and I could never figure out how they stopped you from copying them at that time. Even using a dual cassette deck didn’t work.
I learned later that they had written BASIC programs that self-deleted specific POKEs in the program using early-loaded routines, then replaced it with other code (usually a REM), and some self-modifying assembly code to show where this routine loaded in memory. Pretty tricky stuff, but it worked. Dual cassette decks didn’t work due to data degradation in the second generation copy. Digitizing cassettes these days is trivial as long as the tape isn’t too degraded.
Brian nice detail!
Do you do much copying of older cassette games nowadays?
Not these days, but if I had to, there’s now a myriad of audio programs for the Mac and PC that could do the transfer flawlessly if the tape is in readable shape.
I do write some code, although it’s strictly scripting on top of two abstraction layers rather than actual coding. I’m too old to learn new stuff :)