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Classic Games (Games) Media Music Entertainment Games

Vinyl Records Yield '80s Videogame Nostalgia 51

Posted by simoniker from the tintin-would-be-proud dept.
Thanks to Kempa.com for its weblog entry discussing music vinyl/cassettes released in the late 70's and early 80's that contained computer programs as part of the audio. The article explains: "Most of these programs were written for the Sinclair Spectrum home computer series... In the case of these programs on vinyl, the user would have to play back the proper portion of the record, record the resultant chatter to tape, and load the tape into the Spectrum." It goes on to showcase UK vinyl-based games from "rockabilly revivalist" Shakin' Stevens ("The goal of 'The Shaky Game' is to drive Shakin' Stevens' car to the center of a maze while avoiding bats, who bite you"), as well as a flexidisc adventure game starring '80s pop stars The Thompson Twins ("...a bizarre text-based adventure in which you guide the [band] around a land of beaches and caves.")
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Vinyl Records Yield '80s Videogame Nostalgia More

Vinyl Records Yield '80s Videogame Nostalgia

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  • d00d, I 4m s00 1337! (Score:4, Funny)

    by weeboo0104 ( 644849 ) on Thursday March 18, 2004 @07:12PM (#8604881) Journal
    I overclocked my records to 78rpm!!!

    • In fact, this is exactly how the Hampsterdance came about. Walt Disney Records apparently published a 45 RPM 7" single called "Whistle Stop" by Roger Miller, from the album Disney's Robin Hood Soundtrack. Playing it on 78 RPM produces the hamster-like scat singing [google.com] we're all too familiar with.

  • Using Vinyl.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by metrazol ( 142037 ) <.ude.llenroc. .ta. .33mwj.> on Thursday March 18, 2004 @07:13PM (#8604889)
    I would like to say this is the dumbest thing ever described but... I was digging through some old stuff and found these odd clear plastic discs in some of my grandfather's stuff.

    They were navigation data and his service records from the air force...on floppy translucent plastic discs. Took me about 20 minutes to stop laughing, but they held up! Not going to plop them onto my turntable though. Just proves that when you give people a popular medium, they'll try and stick anything they can on it. CDs used to be for music, remember?

    • Re:Using Vinyl.... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by kaens ( 639772 )
      well if the medium can be used for things other than what it was origianally intended for, why shouldn't it be?

      CD's hold a lot more information than floppy disks, remember?

      nice sig by the way.....gotta love Kurt Vonnegut
    • How are(were) you supposed to get the data back off the discs? Do you play them like a record and get back dictated information? Or is it microfiche-like?

      I know there are some projects around the net looking to preserve obsolete data storage devices and media. The logic being that if we ever need to recover important/interesting data off an old format, we won't be out of luck. That, and the sheer geek-value of tons of old equipment. Unfortunately, some devices are already lost in the cogs of time. If yo
    • I would like to say this is the dumbest thing ever described but...

      Yeah, SO much dumber than putting data on cassette tapes, VCR tapes, or CDs. I mean, those are supposed to be used for AV type stuff, right ;)

      • Don't make fun of my PXL-2000!

        Just kidding. It's a format that actually holds up for, oh MILLENIA as opposed to a few years, like cassette or any kind of tape, CDs, etc.

        The PXL-2000 is a video camera that uses cassettes, btw. It's so neat for 80's junk. I love it.
    • Dumbest thing? Actually, I'd say it was quite impressive for the time. Remember, in the early to mid-80's, nobody really had CDs, and I don't recall ever seeing a CD player attached to a home computer until maybe 1988 (and they were expensive!)

  • In Soviet Russia... ;-) (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PaulBu ( 473180 ) on Thursday March 18, 2004 @07:23PM (#8604953) Homepage
    ... before the DAT or even 1/2" tape drives became reasonably cheap some clever Russian hackers managed to make a setup to back-up data on videotape using more or less standard VCR and custom interface card. I've heard it worked pretty good, with some hundreds of MBs fitting on a tape". But then, again, it was in 1988 or something...

    Paul B.

    • Re:In Soviet Russia... ;-) (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jpmkm ( 160526 ) on Thursday March 18, 2004 @07:33PM (#8605033) Homepage
      Hey I bought a backer32 at a garage sale for $1 last summer. I haven't tried it out yet. It is supposed to hold something like 2 gigs on a vhs tape and it interfaces through the parallel port. I don't think I'll trust my data to a medium designed to store analog video.
      • Maybe you should. A lot of independant musicians are using VHS to record albums now and producing excellent work for much less money than traditional recording methods would cost them.

      • Re:In Soviet Russia... ;-) (Score:4, Informative)

        by PaulBu ( 473180 ) on Thursday March 18, 2004 @10:58PM (#8606543) Homepage
        Well, I was trying to remember what kind of a port the thing used, my first thought was that it was a parallel port, but passing a gig through that would be way too long.

        What is the BW of an (analog) video signal, like about 10 MHz, 20 Mbps for optimal (Shannon) encoding? Throw in some ECC and you get back down to 10+ Mbps, which would give you 10M/s*3600s=36 Gb/tape for one hour tape. I think that the densities were more like a Gb or two per tape, limited by the BW of the interface (IDE?), but definitely outside of the parallel port capability...

        Paul B.
        • Nowdays, a more reliable yet still cost effective solution would be to use MiniDV tape to record data. 5 GB per tape w/ error correction sounds reasonable to me, and considering that the data is recorded digitally end-to-end (via firewire), and recorded twice to compensate for the magnetic tape, this seems to be a great idea. It wont be as cheap as VHS, but its much cheaper than DLT or MO solutions.
        • What is the BW of an (analog) video signal, like about 10 MHz, 20 Mbps for optimal (Shannon) encoding? Throw in some ECC and you get back down to 10+ Mbps, which would give you 10M/s*3600s=36 Gb/tape for one hour tape.

          Or you could take the approach of RCA with their vinyl videodisc system [cedmagic.com] and just encode straight onto the vinyl...

          From the Videodisc FAQ [cedmagic.com]:
          What are the technical specifications of the RCA VideoDisc system? [cedmagic.com]

          Video Signal to Noise Ratio: >46dB (CCIR)

          Chrominance Signal-to-Noise Ratio:

      • What's so wrong about analog video?
        • Well there is nothing wrong with analog video, but analog storage(especially consumer-level) doesn't have to be as precise and reliable as digital storage. Your VHS tape can degrade a bit, but it will generally still be watchable. If you stored data on it and the tape degraded, you lose bits that you cannot get back. The backer device uses all kinds of error correction to store the data on the VHS tapes, and that is why you can only get so little data on a tape.
          • I think you've got it all wrong.

            How are any of the problems you've mentioned any different with VHS tape than they are for "digital" mediums like DAT/DDS, AIT, Exabyte 8mm, or whatever?

            I submit that all tape degrades. If it degrades "a little," it'll still be recoverable/watchable. If it degrades more than that, you lose bits that you cannot get back.

            They all use error correction to help with this problem.

            • Yes, all magnetic mediums degrade, but data storage mediums are much higher quality than consumer analog video mediums. Since when do VCRs use error correction? How would they even be able to tell if there was an error?
              • Since when do VCRs use error correction?
                You said it yourself, some days ago:
                The backer device uses all kinds of error correction to store the data on the VHS tapes

                *shrug*

                I don't have one of these things, so I'll just have to take your word for it and let you prove yourself wrong.

                Thanks, champ!

  • You know you're tired... (Score:3, Funny)

    by irokitt ( 663593 ) <archimandrites-i ... minus physicist> on Thursday March 18, 2004 @07:43PM (#8605138)
    When you see "vinyl" in a Slashdot story and then wonder about whether the content is dirty or not.

    Guess I was born too late for this story, huh?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Almost all games on the C64 took between 3-5 minutes to load from tape. I did have a copy of Boulderdash that took 11 seconds to load from tape! Oh, and I remember Racing Destruction Set to be the worst game ever to play from tape.

      The only things that would usually take longer than 5 minutes would be things you saved yourself with no compression, but everyone had turbo loader software or an Action Replay cartridge to save the memory to a fast loading file. This was back in the days when people bought Ac
  • Does anyone see the irony of this in regards to the RIAA? Back in those days, people distribute their computer software via audio cassette tapes and vinyl records, a distribution medium monopolized by the RIAA. Now, we distribute nearly everything digitialized via the Internet, a medium that cannot be controlled by the RIAA.
  • It's really not extremely different from today's 'enhanced' CDs. I wonder, though, if it was truly meant as a feature in those days, or if it was just a way to get those crazy college students to buy the album rather than swapping it for free. If you had to copy it to cassette to play the game anyways, I imagine the piracy-prevention didn't do much more than piss off the legitimate purchasers who just heard a bunch of binary when they wanted to listen to their music.

    Some things never change : )
    • Well, "In the case of these programs on vinyl, the user would have to play back the proper portion of the record, record the resultant chatter to tape, and load the tape into the Spectrum." - Nope, wouldn't work if you taped the whole record ;-)

  • Stranglers - Aural Quest (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Stranglers had a text adventure on the tape copy of Aural Sculpture

    Read about it here

    http://www.stranglers.net/tapes.html
  • Slightly OT:
    There was a record that came with the game Lode Runner that had song "talk to me" by the band mainframe. One of the best new wave synth bands ever. I only have a badly-recorded MP3 of it.
  • I used to have a music cd from the late 80s.. one of the tracks was a modem. You could hold your phone up to the speakers and it would display the lyrics to the album in procomm.

    I wish I could remember which band it was.

  • It's by "Kissing the Pink" and it's for the BBC Micro

    It produces a set of visuals to go with the music on the A side

    It's in storage atm. and I'm not going off to find it :)

  • As a music-loving Spectrum-owning kid in the 80s, I'm staggered I've never heard of this phenonmena before. I take my hat off to the author, though perhaps memories of a Shakin' Steven game should have been forever buried.

    Does anyone else remember the rather surreal Frankie Goes to Hollywood game, which was probably the most successful music-computer game tie-in?

    P.

  • Anyone remember the Spectrum CD thing? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by paulcammish ( 542971 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @08:57AM (#8608967)
    I have a vague memory of and old Codemasters collection on CD, which was sort of the same.

    If i remember right, there was a cart for the Spectrum, which plugged into the headphone socket on your CD player (a luxury back in 1987!) and then it would load games from the cd, at about 4 times the usual speed.

    I havent a CLUE what it was called. All I remember is a double page advert in Your Sinclair, with this device and a CD that was being sold with 40 or so Codemasters games.

    Anyone else remember this? If it ever existed, it could pretty much be one of the first CD-Roms!

    And for anyone whos wondering, heres an old game I wrote about the same time...

    Bwwwwwwwwoooooooo BIP! Bwwwwwwwwooooooo Beieieiieieieiieieiiieieieiieieieieie!
    Bwoooo Beieieieieieieieiieiieiiieieiieieieiieieieieieiiei eiei!
  • had a "hidden" track on the CD of Peace & Love, Inc. that was a 300bps 8-N-1 modem squeal that (if you could get your modem to talk to it) typed a message out to the screen. Then on Don't Be Afraid he had another one that (supposedly) was the first part of an "Internet scavenger hunt". Heh, the "winners" [insoc.org] look just like you would imagine they would...
  • The apex of multimedia vinyl technology in the 1980s was probably RCA's videodisc system [cedmagic.com]. This vinyl-based analog video system competed against early Laserdisc.

    Of *course* people are still fleabaying them [ebay.com]. You can even get the Original Star Wars Trilogy on black vinyl videodisc [ebay.com]...
  • More recently (2000), the Chicago group 8-bit Construction Set's Atari vs. Commodore EP included software for both computers. Ironically, they boasted (or joked?) [beigerecords.com]:
    first use of vinyl for software distribution - ever

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