What follows are some of the highlights

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The main variations are the use of different lines or arrangement of lines to reflect this. For example, this thinner and more “high resolution”-feeling version:


This was more than sufficient for most cassette-based titles. But some wanted to go a little further to inform the user.


A significant upgrade was adding a sort of “loading screen” to the process, where the lines would still move, but around a “title card” that informed you what was “coming soon” to your computer. Some had nice graphics to accompany them, representing some attempt at recreating the printed artwork on the cassette insert.



An impressive upgrade, but not something to leave phone number database well enough alone to a generation of tinkerers.

To give an answer of “are we there yet?”, some titles included calculated countdown timers to tell users how long they had to go before the game would go:




And again, this would have been a favorable solution to the “sit and wait” problem, but a handful of instances exist of the most rare of tape-loading systems: The Loading Games. Games that would be booted up by the system, that would then load the actual programs in the background while you played an amusement, either a song or a smaller game while waiting.

These are harder to discern using the screenshotting system, but a few are clear:





Perhaps not surprisingly, this clear and available innovation in software loading was ignored when Namco created a “play while you load” system in the 1990s, and they were granted a software patent that killed innovation in the bud for years.