Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Vinyl Records Yield '80s Videogame Nostalgia

Posted by simoniker on 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.")

3 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Re:In Soviet Russia... ;-) by PhosterPharms · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:In Soviet Russia... ;-) by PaulBu · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:In Soviet Russia... ;-) by jpmkm · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.