Slashdot Mirror
Vinyl Records Yield '80s Videogame Nostalgia
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.")
I overclocked my records to 78rpm!!!
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
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?
"Life's funny sometimes." "And sometimes it isn't." --Cat's Cradle
... 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.
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?
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
I remember loading games from the Commodore 64 from Datasette. After all was said and done, the thing was a tape driven 300 Baud modem!
A minimum of 3 minute wait time if the tape had a fast loader, and up to half an hour if it was saved by standard loading.
Then the heads would always go askew and the tape would come up with errors....
Man those days suck... thank god they aren't coming back!
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
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 : )
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.
Yes, there was even a Frankie Goes To Hollywood game back in the 80s, though i don't think it was on any of their tapes. It was exceedingly bizarre, but the music was better than the Twins' ;-)
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 we're all too familiar with.
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
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
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...
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" look just like you would imagine they would...
The apex of multimedia vinyl technology in the 1980s was probably RCA's videodisc system. This vinyl-based analog video system competed against early Laserdisc.
Of *course* people are still fleabaying them. You can even get the Original Star Wars Trilogy on black vinyl videodisc...
Da Blog
Or you could take the approach of RCA with their vinyl videodisc system and just encode straight onto the vinyl...
From the Videodisc FAQ:
What are the technical specifications of the RCA VideoDisc system?
Da Blog
That's exactly like what they're talking about in this article! Except instead of code on vinyl records transferred to tape and run on Spectrums, it's analog video signals on a proprietary vinyl medium played on dedicated units and output to TV sets. In other words not the same thing at all. So what was the point of that again?