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Release date: 13th of August, 2020
Welcome to the most complete Commodore 64 cassette archive that exists. By complete, we do not mean it contains all the titles ever made, but all included titles are complete with coverscans and manuals all in one place for you to enjoy.
In December 2018, we gave you a small taste of our efforts to preserve history. Now, one and a half years later, we decided it was time to for a follow-up. We hereby bring you V2.0, which consists of 1000 unique releases (including those from V1). While we do strive for 100% complete releases, we decided to include a few releases that we currently miss posters or audio tapes for, but we will be adding these when/if we get hold of them. Their absence should still not cause the games to be any less playable.
Now that the archive has more than doubled since the previous version, you'll also notice that more games can be found multiple times. This is because our main focus is on the various tape releases rather than individual games. Some games had many re-releases, very commonly in various game compilation packs.
For the games that can benefit from index files (.idx, supported by DC2N, NOVA64 and the Ultimate products), we've done our best to create them. Particularly for game compilations and multi-load games. A few of these multi-load games are so poorly programmed, they do not stop the tape when a title screen or level is loaded. There is no workaround that we can apply for these, so if you find a game not loading properly, be sure to check if this is the cause. There is also one version of the Burner fast loading system that will not work on all C64s. This is because the loader is written using unofficial machine code instructions, some of which are unstable and create different results on different C64s.
As last time, we have used Tape Manager V1.3 (https://csdb.dk/release/?id=172213) to organize the content, and again exported an sqlite-file for the NOVA64 front end, but we recommend using the latest version (https://csdb.dk/release/?id=194393) which now also supports showing tapes from one specific label. As before, this version also has features to run the images on both emulators and real C64s.
Just as last time...
You are free to distribute this archive to your friends, but it should always remain 100% free and kept away from any solutions that require any kind of registration or payment. Apart from that, we do not care much about what happens, as we consider this a piece of history, OUR history. We will try to release updated versions of this archive regularly as we progress in the task of testing, cleaning and editing scans of the releases we acquire. Only images from known sources are included in this archive.
We hope you will have fun and find lots of great memories!
Thanks to Stadium64 for supplying manuals for Basket Master, Ocean's Greatest Hits, Konami Coin-Op Hits and Championship Sprint.
Signed,
The Ultimate Tape Archive Team
