Ah, yes. 300 lines of basic from a magazine, wrote it to a cassette tape and played it back when I wanted to play the game.

Same with Commodore and my Japanese drum machine from the 90s.

Stands to reason that VHS would put that "on steroids", relatively speaking.

And for some reason, copying the tapes via a double-deck never worked. I had to use software like Mr. Copy to copy over the tapes I borrowed from a classmate.

There's some projects on guthub that turns sound into files same deal. Interesting way to convert and its been around for a long time.

The Atari 400 and 800 used a modified cassette player to store and load. It was tremendously buggy with the sync tone that started transfer.