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oh yeah I've seen some videos on this subject, it wasn't a common way to spread software but more of an occasional gimmick.
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Mar 2, 2024 20:54
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I assume it happened in many countries, but there were C64 games sent on a national radio station in the late 80s in Finland. Life was easy when everything was convertible to lo-fi audio.
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Mar 2, 2024 21:02
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Is this like a floppy drive? Or like the data version of the Sony minisdisc? What's the capacity?
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Mar 2, 2024 21:08
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stephenthinkpad posted:Is this like a floppy drive? Or like the data version of the Sony minisdisc? What's the capacity? It's like a cassette tape drive. The data is stored in audio.
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Mar 2, 2024 21:10
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Groovy
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Mar 2, 2024 21:14
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There were a few magazines that did this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Age
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Mar 2, 2024 21:45
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I remember when I was young Kellogg's Frosties did something similar, by putting "thin vinyl" on the front of the cereal box that you had to cut out. I had a few of these (image stolen from a YouTube video about it)
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Mar 2, 2024 22:01
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"Mega hits of 1990"! That's a bit later than I would have expected novelty vinyl!
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Mar 2, 2024 22:06
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Charles Ford posted:I remember when I was young Kellogg's Frosties did something similar, by putting "thin vinyl" on the front of the cereal box that you had to cut out. I had a few of these (image stolen from a YouTube video about it) Those were fun. The first I remember was "Yummy, yummy, yummy, I've got love in my tummy" which I thiiiiink was on Sugar Crisp?
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Mar 2, 2024 22:10
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My brother had one from the Jackson 5. I think it was "Goin' Back to Indiana." God that was a long time ago. EDIT: 1972! 
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Mar 2, 2024 22:11
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The McDonald's Million dollar flexidisc was peak vinyl I'm not checking to see the quality of this link or info, but you're Goons, you know how to slap a search string into your AltaVistas and Bings and Googles: https://tonedeaf.thebrag.com/mcdonalds-million-dollars-vinyl-record/
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Mar 2, 2024 22:13
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Charles Ford posted:I remember when I was young Kellogg's Frosties did something similar, by putting "thin vinyl" on the front of the cereal box that you had to cut out. I had a few of these (image stolen from a YouTube video about it) Didn't know about this. poo poo is cool, as cool as Sneak King video game. Xbox 360?
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Mar 2, 2024 22:47
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stephenthinkpad posted:Is this like a floppy drive? Or like the data version of the Sony minisdisc? What's the capacity? The tape drives on early home computers used ordinary audio cassette tapes to store programs and data. If you listened to one of those data tapes in a regular player, you'd hear a lot of buzzing and screeching that sounded a lot like dial-up modem noises. But that could more usefully go in the other direction -- the sound of a program could be distributed on a vinyl record, or played on the radio, or via any other audio medium, and all you had to do was record it to a cassette tape and (assuming the sound quality had been good enough) it could be read by your computer. If you wanted to send a copy of a tape to a friend, you could even play it over the phone for them to record on their end... and so the similarity to modem noises suddenly makes perfect sense.
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Mar 2, 2024 22:52
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Powered Descent posted:The tape drives on early home computers used ordinary audio cassette tapes to store programs and data. If you listened to one of those data tapes in a regular player, you'd hear a lot of buzzing and screeching that sounded a lot like dial-up modem noises. But that could more usefully go in the other direction -- the sound of a program could be distributed on a vinyl record, or played on the radio, or via any other audio medium, and all you had to do was record it to a cassette tape and (assuming the sound quality had been good enough) it could be read by your computer. And these days, a popular and easy way to load games into these kinds of old computers is to plug audio out from a phone or mp3 player into the tape input on these computers and play the game as a mp3 file.
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Mar 2, 2024 23:03
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The famous Bandersnatch episode of Black Mirror contained a noise that was familiar to many brits of a certain age. It was a Speccy game and if you ripped the audio you got this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrr4AHmmZqY
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Mar 2, 2024 23:08
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There was a programme on uk tv back in the mid 80s which used to broadcast a program during episodes you could record and run if you'd built the device to capture it and also had whatever computer it was for. Pretty sure you can see it at the top right of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXGFqKjc9AY https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0968721/
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Mar 2, 2024 23:24
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And now having watched that about the Amiga I have this song stuck in my head so hope you all will too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWeO5IkCssk ONLY AMIGA!
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Mar 2, 2024 23:35
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Explosionface posted:I have to help people troubleshoot a lot of weird issues with our equipment before we ship it. I always tell people to start with the dumbest problems first (is it plugged in? Is it turned on? etc.) and step up from there. The worst people are the ones who have an idea of what they think is wrong and keep trying to come back to it even after that's been eliminated. We did similar practice with troubleshooting when I was technical support, with the added layer of figuring out what the customer wanted. I probably still have the notes somewhere from our example with a TV not working, starting from "TV doesn't work" and ending with the actual issue, no batteries in the remote
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Mar 3, 2024 00:14
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Arivia posted:And these days, a popular and easy way to load games into these kinds of old computers is to plug audio out from a phone or mp3 player into the tape input on these computers and play the game as a mp3 file. The humble Speccy can also load at about 10x normal speed over the audio interface if you have a nice clean (and loud) source, like an MP3 player, without any hardware mods being required! OTLA is one piece of software which can "play" the audio in the correct format for this to work, and it's pretty amazing that the hardware supports this  Not sure which other old micros support this - it depends if the hardware has some sort of baud rate lock to the "expected" rates?
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Mar 3, 2024 11:41
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I've seen some youtubers show off show off loading software from audio CDs. Since the sound quality is so much higher, it can be loaded a lot faster than tape.
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Mar 3, 2024 12:14
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Charles Ford posted:I remember when I was young Kellogg's Frosties did something similar, by putting "thin vinyl" on the front of the cereal box that you had to cut out. I had a few of these (image stolen from a YouTube video about it) They were called 'flexi-discs' and have been around since the 60s. The sound quality wasn't great and they tended to wear out very quickly, but they were dirt cheap to produce and got used all through the 60s and 70s for various things that didn't justify the cost of a real vinyl pressing - promotional releases, magazine freebies, etc. They mostly died off by the 80s, except for novelty stuff like this. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 12:54 on Mar 3, 2024 |
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Mar 3, 2024 12:33
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Obligatory reference to Bloom County’s “Billy and the Boingers: Bootleg” cartoon book which I have in a box somewhere
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Mar 3, 2024 17:37
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evobatman posted:I've seen some youtubers show off show off loading software from audio CDs. Since the sound quality is so much higher, it can be loaded a lot faster than tape. This isn't exactly novel. 
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Mar 3, 2024 19:23
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legooolas posted:The humble Speccy can also load at about 10x normal speed over the audio interface if you have a nice clean (and loud) source, like an MP3 player, without any hardware mods being required! The ZX 80/81/Spectrum did all the tape I/O in software. The speed was limited so that it would work on the cheapest, crappiest tape recorders that people were likely to have. Other micros of the era probably did it in similar ways. IIRC some later games had custom loaders that ran at higher speeds (and worked as copy protection).
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Mar 3, 2024 19:51
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evobatman posted:I've seen some youtubers show off show off loading software from audio CDs. Since the sound quality is so much higher, it can be loaded a lot faster than tape. How does that work? Did the computer control the tapes playback speed to error correct?
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Mar 3, 2024 20:00
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Sweevo posted:They were called 'flexi-discs' and have been around since the 60s. The sound quality wasn't great and they tended to wear out very quickly, but they were dirt cheap to produce and got used all through the 60s and 70s for various things that didn't justify the cost of a real vinyl pressing - promotional releases, magazine freebies, etc. They mostly died off by the 80s, except for novelty stuff like this. National Geographic’s whale sounds flexi-disc comes to mind.
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Mar 3, 2024 21:10
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I remember having cereal boxes with vinyl presses on them. They sorta worked.
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Mar 3, 2024 21:58
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Killingyouguy! posted:How does that work? Did the computer control the tapes playback speed to error correct? If I remember, the reason why it worked better using a digital signal off of a computer/-mp3 player/CD player was because you didn't have to account for things like wow and flutter that you got on tape decks. The way I was explained it was that a cassette version is like writing out the code 3 times, and using the data that shows up at least twice, while the digital signal just has to write it out once. As long as the volume is set properly, it will give the same signal 100% of the time.
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Mar 3, 2024 22:58
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Randalor posted:If I remember, the reason why it worked better using a digital signal off of a computer/-mp3 player/CD player was because you didn't have to account for things like wow and flutter that you got on tape decks. The way I was explained it was that a cassette version is like writing out the code 3 times, and using the data that shows up at least twice, while the digital signal just has to write it out once. As long as the volume is set properly, it will give the same signal 100% of the time. Huh, I assumed it was using forward error correction too and was curious what code it used, but turns out it doesn't. https://shred.zone/cilla/story/440/spectrum-loading.html It only has parity checksums, which would only allow for detection, not for correction. It seems the slowness of the loading is actually just for synching.
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Mar 3, 2024 23:31
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namlosh posted:Obligatory reference to Bloom County’s “Billy and the Boingers: Bootleg” cartoon book which I have in a box somewhere This? 
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Mar 4, 2024 02:54
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Mister Kingdom posted:This? That’s exactly it… mine is just loose within the pages since we played it once. The songs were… not great
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Mar 4, 2024 03:07
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You know I got one those mini cd disc once or twice in promotions. I think you can only put 1 song on it.
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Mar 4, 2024 04:25
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This is bringing back a pre-teen childhood memory when I was going through my father's records, mostly Nana Mouskouri and Neil Diamond. No idea why I was looking at the discs, but I found a red floppy record tucked into an album and it had no real descriptive label on it. I played it and it turned out to be audio of two ladies having adult fun together. It was gone by the time I got to my teenage years and would have appreciated it more, so that sucked. 
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Mar 4, 2024 08:25
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stephenthinkpad posted:You know I got one those mini cd disc once or twice in promotions. I think you can only put 1 song on it. I got a bunch of them when I was young and dumb. They held I think 155mb. The cases were sold separately and done hot dog style. like you could buy 25 Mini-CD's and a pack of 20 cases or something dumb? Pretty sure I gave them away because they came out right around the same time as decent USB thumb drives. There were also business card variants and variants with weird shapes and variants where they made a mini-cd in full cd size. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_(band) The outer ring on this is clear. It looks neater than this pic suggests: 
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Mar 4, 2024 19:13
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https://twitter.com/HumanoidHistory/status/1764714424500101496?s=20
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Mar 4, 2024 20:23
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Gromit posted:I found a red floppy record tucked into an album and it had no real descriptive label on it. I played it and it turned out to be audio of two ladies having adult fun together. It was gone by the time I got to my teenage years and would have appreciated it more, so that sucked. Wait up… you found flexi-disc porn???? That is incredible. Is there any more info out there on this??
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Mar 4, 2024 20:27
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Jesus, these things were so clunky. Seeing one in a futuristic hood instead of a cramped smelly booth almost gives me whiplash.
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Mar 4, 2024 20:30
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namlosh posted:Wait up… you found flexi-disc porn????  https://www.trunkrecords.com/releases/flexi_04/flexi.php Wasabi the J has a new favorite as of 20:34 on Mar 4, 2024 |
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Mar 4, 2024 20:31
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"Dorset's Devastating Fenella" never has a sexier description been given. Dorset? The sex capital of the world, everyone knows that. Devastating? The most arousing of adjectives. Fenella? A name that's a pleasure to say and tempts you with so much more.
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Mar 4, 2024 20:37
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Why is it so huge? What is in that phone that requires such a huge housing?
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Mar 4, 2024 20:43
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