I find this stuff fascinating; Chris Sievey was actually working on a Spectrum release for his next single, Red Indian, which never saw light of day. This was an upgraded version of the Camouflage experience, where you could actually experiment with the "light show" yourself. Check out this video where he's interviewed by Tony Fletcher about it: th-cam.com/video/3pWj4ejQRco/w-d-xo.html
DUDE, YOU ARE SO NAIVE! All popular media person became popular because they joined freemasonic Lodges, and freemasons, except for lowest degrees are crypto satanist, the true satanist that rape and eat babies and drink their adrenochromed (after sexual abuse and torture) blood for real and part of pizzagate and all stuff related to epstein, podesta, marina abramovich. Those crazy Masons are mostly unaware sub divisions of Jesuits order which is true illuminati aka alumbrado order which was formed by underground remains of Templar order that was banned for satanism (sethanism) , worship of baphomet/Muhammed and for basically a crypto manichenian herecy that Templars got from katar/hazar Assassins, all of whom was known for child abuse and used of ritual drugs, which was same old adrenochrome they used to produce by torture of children. This satanist or earlier manichenian herecy happens since first crusade and followers of it not just live among us but basically became elite of society and anyone who join elite got brainwashed with satanism, the modern form of manichenian herecy. And many musicians, actors, businessman and politicians, are bat shit crazy satanists freemasons, a continuation of templars and assassins. I'm not Christian by the way, I'm man of pure science, but before blaming Christians in crazy ideas about satanist everywhere do some research and be aware that it's not a bullshit, not like us, atheists, Christians are more aware of existence of Satan worshippers, however what Christians not aware of is that both religions created by Jesuits/templar hijacked catholic church and just two sides of same coin and Jesuits who invented fake Christianity history 500 years ago also invented satanism and control both parties, pushing Christianity to poor people and Satanism to rich and manipulating both, while secretly top of Jesuits are scientists/neo alchemists who worship sun, moon and comet know as baphomet or Muhammed or Jesus or Lucifer or Satan.
I remember an old joke: they say if you play a windows 95 CD backwards it'll pay satanic messages. That's nothing! If you play it forwards it'll install windows 95!
@@penfold7800 depends how old you are! I had windows 95 corrupt a hard drive beyond recovery in my 386 so the first version wasn't perfect either. (It wasn't hardware issue, reformat and installed DR-DOS 7.02 with windows 3.11 and it was fine)
Finnish band Tarot used backmasking on their 1986 album 'Spell of Iron'. On the song "Pharao" there's a message in finnish, that says "I knew you'd listen to this backwards you pervert" :D
Heads up, you’d turntable is likely not spinning at the correct RPM. A few off for audio isn’t really noticeable but for computer code it shifts the frequency enough to create an issue
It's most likely not spot on. Although it was loading some files. But combined with ingrained dirt, warping on the discs and other artifacts, I just didn't have time to run through all the motions.
2:39 always reminds me of the time we were traveling home from school on the school bus and we were allowed to pass tapes to the driver to play and someone passed up the coach a C64 computer tape....
Today we have the SJWs, back then we had the Evangelicals and "Moral Majority" as it were. People need to stop giving ideological loonies power. Especially private power.
My favorite backmasking tape was something along the lines of "This record is reversible, but time is not" I remember finding it on a flashvideo website many eons ago...
Another ELO track: Fire on High, from the album Face the Music. That was their first response to the incident mentioned in the video where they were accused of being satanists. If you listen to the whole message, it's a deliberately overblown and ominous instruction to stop wasting your limited time on Earth listening to records backwards.
Re. The Inner City Unit NewAnatomy program, I wrote it.. you didn't look at the source code did you for the easter egg competition within and easter egg withing a... oh you know :) the program was cut directly to the lathe from a Spectrum. The version on the vinyl is the last version, the other version was one I sent to a stupid person who couldn't get the program to load from vinyl hense the filename and my bit of code to see if I'd filled the Spectrum up yet. I still have an emulated version running on my phone for those times when we do gigs today and people ask about it.. If you look at the sleeve the data track is listed as "Hectic Electric" and the album liner notes say "for more information colour your screen spectrum" I claimed it as "Avant Garde electronic" on the publishing info for the tracks on the album in a desperate royalty grabbing move.. There was a sticker on early copies proclaiming "free spectrum program" but we removed it because people were getting shirty in record shops demanding their free cassette :) You didn't try "0" on the menu.. ;) Thanks for the fun review! Steve - ICU 
Me and a few friend were heavily into 48k Spectrums ( & I.C.U.) & actually got this to work back in the day. i would love to go back & check it out again. I also didnt know that you "Steve" wrote it. Well done old bean.Dingwalls were the best gigs. especially the ones with Bob Calvert. x
Hi Steve, never knew that was your doing. Is there no limit to your talent and deviousness. Hope yer well and love to the missus. PS, are we gonna get a Krankschaft game on the next album?
@@StevePond it would be a really nice gesture if you could leave a link to a clean mp3 of the original track. Personally, I dislike emulators. But I guess they're useful to get these nostalgic games in more peoples hands than actual machines got produced.x
Information Society deserves to be on this list. They did multiple things with hidden data tracks, including starting an online scavenger hunt to piece together a file that decompresses to an extra song not available directly on the album.
When i was a kid, we found a copy of "Leonard Nimoy Sings." So of course we played it backwards. All 5 of us there clearly heard "Shatner loves Goats."
30:20 ;) 10 PRINT "we're no strangers to love" 20 FOR I=1 TO 1000: NEXT I 30 PRINT "you know the rules and so do i" 40 FOR I=1 TO 1000: NEXT I ... 130 PRINT "never gonna let you down" ... 250 GO TO 10 ;) actually it's a moving lobster picture, flashing border and text I love lobsters, best of all, the crustaceans. I love lobsters THEY'RE OUR FRIENDS 290 REM LobstaligaNerd 2
Ricardo Martinez I’ve paused the video then loaded audacity. Set input as direct audio out and pressed play on TH-cam and record in audacity. That was how I extracted the audio track. Then I used fuse to load the audio track.
Nilbog is Goblin spelled backwards! My first encounter with code tracks was the last track on Information Society's second album. Decoding that modem conversation with a loudspeaker, phone, and modem was quite the challenge. Later a simple DSP program made it so much simpler. A later album included a treasure hunt to find a download of the hidden track, but by the time I even heard the album existed, the links you were supposed to follow were all dead.
At last, someone covering the Thompson Twins Adventure. I remember having this, but not where I got it from. It was a nightmare to rip then as you'd expect. Too light on the stylus and it skated on the flexi, too heavy and the record would just not spin properly. Somehow I did eventually manage to get it loaded. Wasn't worth the hassle!!
It is not just cracks, pops and hiss that make loading programs from vinyl difficult. There is also postprocessing circuitry that assumes the vinyl contains music and is not that helpful with computer binary data. And the second problem is that the vinyl doesn't reproduce the sharp edges of the digital signal very well, leading to the Spectrum having trouble with the signal. In the original ZX Spectrum manual you can even read that "using hi-fi equipment to load Spectrum programs isn't recommended and may lead to poor results".
@@jamesfcarter What's wrong with "LP" or simply just "record", like we used to. I bet the young pups will eventually learn to adapt. I think the biggest issue if we were able to go back in time, would really be that you wouldn't get what anyone was saying and they wouldn't understand you either, even though you would supposedly be speaking the same language. - anyway, I admit that I find myself calling it vinyl too.
there is an album by Isao Tomita Called "The Bermuda Triangle" Which,accordi thelinr notes, has a coded message. I quote - "Each side of this record contains coded data in the form of certain sound effects. The message can be recovered if the electrical signal from the record is interfaced with the input of a micro Computer programmed to the TARBEL system". That's all they tell you. They don't specify what type of Micro Computer to use, but as the album was released in 1979, it can't be very advanced. as i've never heard of TARBEL, I have no idea whether it works , or what the coded message is.
First time I noticed a hidden Easter Egg was around 2000. Nostalgia just kicked in for me. My theory is nostalgia kicks in when you turn 30 and look back to your teens and twens. I found a sampler covering songs from 1984. One of the songs was by the band Propaganda "Dr. Mabuse", prduced by Trevor Horn. I noticed a strange sounding part towards the climax. I dumped the song into Cool Edit 95 (that's already nostalgia by now :-) and reversed it. The song starts with "Why does it hurt when my heart misses the beat", sung by Claudia Brücken. Listening to the reversed played part it reveals "Warum schmerzt es, wenn mein Herz den Schlag verpasst", the literal translation of "Why does it hurt when my heart missed the beat" from the beginning of the song. th-cam.com/video/bHKm4mLTLs8/w-d-xo.html
Tip for cleaning vinyl records. Get some wood glue and pour it over the audio areas. It won't stick to the vinyl but it will trap any dirt or other gubbins. So when you peel it off you get a perfectly clean album :)
Heartware is one of the coolest band names ever. And that cover of the electronic etched heart was wicked amazing! Very surprising it is from 1986, it seems so sleek and modern!
A important tip with Flexidscs: On most record players you need to place some sort of weight on the center area of the disc such a coin to prevent the disc from slipping around on the platter (you may even want to tape the coin down). Also, Flexidiscs aren’t designed to last very long so it was common to copy contents to a cassette tape so you don’t wear down the Flexidisc so as to become unplayable.
The easiest way to hide a message in an audio track is with Morse code. If it blends well with the music and locks with the beat it'll be noticed by the few listeners who know the code but ignored by nearly everyone else. These days you don't even need to know Morse code to get the hidden message, you can just decode it with an app on your phone.
@@freeculture You mean like those Musak systems that add a screeching tone above 18kHz to discourage teens from loitering around the more posh stores in a mall.
Red Dwarf had that episode Backwards, and if you play the scene where Rimmer and Kryten are being fired, backwards, it reveals a hidden message slagging you off.
Agustin Goicoechea No, wait, here’s the one! Richard Aplin on Final Fight. But you can still watch the other to see Aplin’s other ramblings... th-cam.com/video/sKk36WKWGUs/w-d-xo.html
Contrary to what you said in your video, it is indeed possible to create a spectrum loader that loads different code both forwards and backwards. The trick to doing so is designing a custom loader - you would still need the BASIC program at the end of the tape but using the absolute minimum timings, no pauses and using the old machine code REM statement trick could make it small enough to be nearly imperceivable, then the rest is all in the 'mixed' loader.
"Urusei Yatsura" is not just coincidence. It seems the Scottish band members watched some Japanese anime and they fell in love with anime named "Urusei Yatsura". The Japanese manga exists already since 1978. It is possible when the members of the band want start together, they need a name for it. And i think one of the members suggest because many of then watched UY series together, they choose this for band name. Really strange way to choose name. There is nothing elsewhere, the name is not just fell out of the sky. It's already well known in Japan and under okatus.
Actually it kinda is. The band members probably thought a Japanese name would sound cool so they went with that. Urusee Yatsura literally means "Obnoxious Bastards", totally fitting the theme of a rogue-like band that were prevalent in the 80s.
@@astral2048 they were a 90s band part of the tail end of Britpop and using twee imagery. The name was more likely chosen ironically because they weren't that.
I actually remeber hearing an interview of them at the radio back then, of course their name is tied to the anime, it would be quite the coincidence if it were not. IIRC they came to know about the anime when they did a trip in Japan (but don't quote me on this). BTW, in my country (which is Italy) Urusey Yatsura is widely known, it was aired and re-run numerous times since the 80s. Down here they aired every relevant anime of the 70s and 80s.
Odd. "Otaku" is actual Japanese (basically translates to "nerd"), whereas "okatu" seems to be a bastardization of "otaku" and is crammed into the Urban Dictionary and some social groups. I'm guessing someone must have trolled "okatu" into existence. Shame on them. :P
I used to do it more carefully, with a sharp knife around the edges, and kept the wrap for a while, because they were nice :D I still open up my new music CD's and vinyls so carefully that I can keep them in the original shrinkwrap for added protection...
But anime have soundtrack releases, so it's potentially in the same market. I wouldn't recommend it, even if time, place and popularity meaning they aren't likely to conflict in practice. What if they became really famous? They'd be open to legal trouble, and worse, people who weren't in the know would find out they're nerds!
Glad you mentioned the CD extras at the end. This was a wild video, seeing these bonus programs on tape, and even vinyl! Definitely a precursor to those CD-ROM extras like Primus's Tales From The Punchbowl, Incubus's S.C.I.E.N.C.E., or Deftones's White Pony. Also, that sucks about your Radiohead boxset. How did they manage to ship that without the vinyl? 🤦
There's been quite a few tracks I heard on the radio that clearly had something recorded backwards in it, so the odd chance they played it twice (community radio that is), I managed to grab and play it backwards. Turns out, it was far too hilarious. I forgot what it said, and don't even remember the title of the song either, much less the album or name of the group/artist.
There was a game on the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer that displayed a rant against a popular tape copying program while being copied with it. The author was aware that this software displayed the data on the screen while reading the tape signal. That copying software, incidentally, would not copy itself except that the older version would copy the newer version.
I was about to mention that, though it's a bit outside the ambit of this particular video, in 1994, Mike Oldfield released "The Songs of Distant Earth" (with help from Arthur C. Clarke) drawing inspiration from Clarke's novel of the same title, which included additional content for Apple Macintosh computers of that era. Unfortunately, though I have the CD (now in storage a couple states away), I've never been able to check out the extra content, having never owned a (working) Mac of that particular vintage....
Just a tangential addendum: Not vinyl *or* cassette, but I used to have a promotional floppy disc (the big, actually floppy kind) from the band Information Society containing a game. I get it mixed up with the Stranglers one, but I believe it was a text-only game, and… well, it’s been awhile so I can’t really recall any details. Good luck tracking this one down!
I thought for sure when I clicked on this video, that what was going to happen that some album had recorded what appears to be spectrum code on it, but nobody in the last 30 years could get it to load. And then it turned out that it was just recorded backwards, and that you'd be the first person to discover it.
You can easily create code that runs backwards by including a comment character mid-way along each line. 10 PRINT "HELLO" # 01 OTOG 02 20 GOTO 10 # "OLLEH" TNIRP 01
I'm sure it would be possible to write a program that does something backwards and forwards, but it's not this. The characters are encoded bit by bit, so it would need to make sense in that way. Just typing the same characters but in reverse wouldn't encode the characters to be read backwards (a 1 is a 1, and if played backwards is not 1).
I can't find any reference to it online, but I recall reading (maybe in JimBob's first autobiography) that the intro to 'A Perfect Day to Drop the Bomb' is actually the albums' entire Drum Machine program - which in the late 80s used a tape instead of floppy. I'm not 100% sure on that, but it's defintely never been succesfully loaded into any hardware since release.
If you wanted binary data that could be different forwards and backwards, use a data type where the header contains start address and data length. You would then have a header at the start and the end of the binary segment, with 2 sets of data in the middle. I haven't dug any deeper than this but data types like that do exist.
“Another one bites the dust” is great backwards. It clearly says “it’s fun to smoke marijuana”. I was going to bring up The ELO record but you beat me to it! ;) there are many many more.
I told my friends about how I played a recording of the mp3 backwards on my moms computer back in the early 2000s and found the marijuana message. They didn't believe me.
Well after reading your comment, I searched for it. I did found a video talking about it. But it's really subtle, was this ever confirmed ? or just audio hallucination :)
Im pretty sure thats just your brain creating that phrase due to you having being told it was there. Its just random noise and your brain is trying to make sense of it by searching your memory for possible matches. Same thing as seeing images in tv static or hearing voices in white noise.
I've just checked, and especially the part starting at 2:20 in the track does sound a lot like that phrase when reversed. The fact that the song contains reversed sounds of instruments, does make it clear that they had the means to reverse audio, and makes it somewhat plausible that they tried to craft a part of the song to produce a funny message when played backwards.
I watched a video a long time ago about statistical coincidence and the dangers of human pattern matching (probably a Royal Institution?) The video talked about how if you have enough random data you will eventually find a match for any pattern, and if you are looking for any pattern you don't need much random data at all, and that humans are overly biased to finding patterns in general. This original example was a particularly strong demonstration of the psychological effect of looking for something specific, they said this part had a message backwards, played it forwards, then backwards without telling you what the message was, then told you the message. They did this for several songs, and it was striking how unintelligible the message was before being told what it was and how obvious it was after, for every one.
Oo roo say yaht soo ruh Urusei Yatsura is a manga and anime series by Takahashi Rumiko. It's her first big hit from the early 1980s. Viz is currently publishing the manga in omnibus format and finally to completion. The title means loosely translated "Those Obnoxious Aliens." This is where tiger striped bikini clad Lum-chan comes from.
The album "Peace & Love, Inc" by Information Society in the last track named "300bps n, 8, 1 (terminal mode or ascii download)" contained a text message you could read by connecting your hi-fi to your modem. The message talked about an eventfull night on tour for the band. Track: th-cam.com/video/fcLBGadsu3s/w-d-xo.html Text: www.textfiles.com/humor/is_story.txt
I tried to find out what the easter egg was, I downloaded the audio and converted it to .tzx so that it would work on one of the Sinclair emulators. Sadly, it didn't work. The only way it could work is to put the audio on a cassette and play it on real hardware. I really hope someone will do that and post their findings on the internet.
Well, better late than never I guess? Just saw this video and I noticed the Easter Egg at the end too and tried to see if I could get it to work. Though keep in mind that I have never used a computer old enough to load from audio cassettes in person before and I don't even have a Sinclair, I used an emulator for this. I have no idea if I even correctly converted the audio file to .tap (was not able to get a conversion to .txz or directly loading the .wav file itself to work) in full or if it's corrupted or has pieces missing since it's oddly silent when it looks like it should have sound. Regardless though, I did get it to load and run a program. I... have no idea what this is supposed to be though, I am new to this channel so is this a running gag or reference to something? th-cam.com/video/iUaiSCPijls/w-d-xo.html
When you mused about the (im)possibility of having software that could load both forward and backward, I thought that you could probably just put another program recorded backwards after a full program recorded normally. It would be cool if that could be something along the lines of the famous Karateka easter egg, where the unlabeled side of the disk had the game rendered upside down recorded on it.
I know my inner nerd would have loved to have these albums at home as a kid. During the 2000's some CD albums and samplers here in Germany did similar things. Like I remember when I put Mama's CD of Garret Gates' Anyone of Us in the computer I could actually watch the music video of the second or third song as QuickTime video. I thought this was amazing back then and still is.
That's interesting video about tape recorders for a PC based console I wouldn't know much about. Honestly, I had no idea it was going be about the ZX Spectrum as I was expecting loading up video games backwards like from the last level or somewhat corrupted loading. Interesting that musicians use to make a small game or have their music on a tape or vinyl before having their music featured in video games like in Burnout, WWE or Forza.
Unfortunately the message hidden on the red screen where some unknown program code was included was partially obscured by those popup things that are on what I believe is referred to as the 'end slate' section of the video. I really wish people would take care not to have their end slate obscure some message.
Backmasking is most well known in vinyl, but the only time I've heard it for real, was on cassette. Back in the 90s I knew this guy had an old Fisher Price "baby's first cassette player" thing that had a reverse play button. The only tape we could find backmasking on was from the Christian rock band Petra. It was a warbling, high-pitched, male voice, clearly saying "Oh Satan, you are the holiest, we worship you." This wasn't like one of those Beatles records - if you played the tape forward you couldn't tell there was anything going on.
It's probably the record player, not the record. If it could be recorded on cassette tape as audio, there's no reason a record couldn't handle it. It just doesn't make sense. IIRC reel-to-reel tape (at least at 15ips) is superior to vinyl; I'm almost positive. The dynamic range is *definitely* wider. There are physical limitations to vinyl as a medium that tape doesn't suffer from. The notion that vinyl is inherently superior to CD is absurd, and anyone who asserts that without other qualifying statements simply has no idea what they're talking about.
Professionals sometimes even used (and some still use) 30ips, as the signal-to-noise ratio is higher. However, 15ips could have improved low-frequency response compared to 30 on 1/4" tape. 30ips on 1/2" tape is even better than that (think of the amount of tape involved here lol). I don't know if commercial reel-to-reel releases were available in even 15ips, though; I think they were typically 7.5ips on 1/4in tape. All that was squarely before my time (and I'm 42 😂). There's nothing wrong with enjoying vinyl records as a hobby, of course, but any superiority over CDs was generally due to more care being taken during recording and mastering.
I can say from personal experience that the records were packaged separately to the box, which most of the retail staff didn't know, resulting in people going home and opening a shiny presentation box with no vinyl anywhere to be seen. Took me two visits back to HMV to sort it out and get both the box and clean records.
Nice Information Society also has something like this on their album "Peace and Love, Inc", it's more that you have to run it through a modem in order to see it.
I remember spending many hours trying to get my mac to read that track.. playing it on my discman and holding the headphones to the handset of the phone so the modem would hear the tones, etc. I don't think I ever got it to work perfectly, but I do recall being able to read a portion of the text file.
21:10 I kinda wish you showed some of your progress after looking at a walkthrough? This game intrigues me :-) EDIT: Oh you linked working images in the description, I guess I can just use those if I'm curious enough! Thanks :-)
One of the first things I did when I got my first PC was to record me saying my name, listening to it backwards and then recording myself saying my name backwards, reverse it and listen to how I would say my name as if I had a stroke.
Not a computer program, but something some artists did on vinyl was to put a pair of parallel grooves on one side of the record. Monty Python did this and didn't tell anyone, just to mess with listeners. Their joke being that you'd listen to Side 2, enjoy it, and at some point listen to it later and perhaps end up listening to a completely different version of Side 2 and be like, "Huh? That's not what I was listening to before!" Obviously this gag could only work on a record and not a cassette or CD. Rush did this with a promo 7" single titled "Rush 'N' Roulette," where you drop the needle and randomly get one of several tracks. Bands also liked to put stuff in the run-out groove of the record so that if you didn't have an auto-return feature on the arm, the needle would stay in the groove as it went in a loop over and over until you manually stopped it.
I didn't think playing the code in reverse would do anything. What I did think was that you found backmasked code that when reversed would do something.
Got to say bro,m: the British. Lol Watching the Show “TimeLine” where the last time they discovered a Dinosaur Turd, bro it was 5 miles underground, they had to use the latest escalator technology to uncover it :) then they just cover it back...and moved on with life :) I’m joking ya know :) The End : jokes aside, love your channel, rare stuff. Take this into account: you should do an episode with “Kim Justice” you guys have so much in common, I would love go see an episode you guys talking / debating the past, especially in British Land 80’s lol
(this is a journey.. into sound) We had so many competing systems in the USA at the time it just wasn't possible to have cool things like this. One of the many strengths of the sinclair.
when i saw the track name "300bps 8,N,1" on Information Society's "Peace and Love, Inc." i called a friend and had him set up his modem to receive an incoming call... i put my phone's handset near my stereo's speaker and called him back when it was done... and was amazed to find out he saw quite a bit of text displayed on his screen... a wild on-tour story written by Kurt Harland Valaquen... we both felt quite accomplished having unearthed this hidden fanservice treasure long before it became public knowledge, and i posted the text on a few local dial-up bulletin boards... Kurt would later offer up a similar track on "Don't Be Afraid"... peak nerdery.
And here I was only hoping to find out there is a zx game that played backwards splashed an registration letter or similar Great episode and even better then I hoped for!
Glad you talked about Aural Sculpture/Quest! It was a delight to hear the intro track by Greenfield. RIP. Despite how bad you said it was, I still wanna check it out. It's a cool enough album to warrant owning twice, if nothing else.
Nguyên Minh Hồ - I saw that too in the closed captions and laughed, then started making plans to get him out of the you tubes. May have to get the Mario Bros. involved.
Don't forget a more recent example, just within this last year! The special episode of _Black Mirror_ entitled _Bandersnatch_ had playable ZX-Spectrum code. I don't recall if there was more than one, but for sure it had the "nozedive" game featured in the movie.
I love it how the thumbnail for the video shows a vintage polish turntable, the Unitra G-620 "Fryderyk", a decent machine, but far from perfect. I rebuilt one about half a year ago.
@@Kholaslittlespot1 - I tried this evening, but the output from my phone and tablet isn't being picked up by the Next. I'll need to set up my mixer which has a pre-amp and feed it through that to boost the signal.
@@Kholaslittlespot1 - The setup with my mixer worked and I was able to load the program into my ZX Next via the ear/mic socket as if it were a tape. It's an animated, waving lobster with some text about liking crustaceans. I took a 48k snapshot which will load into Speccy emulators: app.box.com/s/d2cunbliz9qyubnnpx136beu4q4t5uxa
I never had a problem loading any vinyl ZX spectrum code. Just use one channel and disable RIAA correction (Not all phono preamps can do that though). Then just finetune the volume to the input. Of course a high quality turntable helps too...
I find this stuff fascinating; Chris Sievey was actually working on a Spectrum release for his next single, Red Indian, which never saw light of day. This was an upgraded version of the Camouflage experience, where you could actually experiment with the "light show" yourself. Check out this video where he's interviewed by Tony Fletcher about it: th-cam.com/video/3pWj4ejQRco/w-d-xo.html
hi bro!
@@RoverFlushed Greets.
DEFUND THE CHURCH!!!
@ I do hunt for Eater eggs, but only at easter.
DUDE, YOU ARE SO NAIVE! All popular media person became popular because they joined freemasonic Lodges, and freemasons, except for lowest degrees are crypto satanist, the true satanist that rape and eat babies and drink their adrenochromed (after sexual abuse and torture) blood for real and part of pizzagate and all stuff related to epstein, podesta, marina abramovich. Those crazy Masons are mostly unaware sub divisions of Jesuits order which is true illuminati aka alumbrado order which was formed by underground remains of Templar order that was banned for satanism (sethanism) , worship of baphomet/Muhammed and for basically a crypto manichenian herecy that Templars got from katar/hazar Assassins, all of whom was known for child abuse and used of ritual drugs, which was same old adrenochrome they used to produce by torture of children. This satanist or earlier manichenian herecy happens since first crusade and followers of it not just live among us but basically became elite of society and anyone who join elite got brainwashed with satanism, the modern form of manichenian herecy. And many musicians, actors, businessman and politicians, are bat shit crazy satanists freemasons, a continuation of templars and assassins. I'm not Christian by the way, I'm man of pure science, but before blaming Christians in crazy ideas about satanist everywhere do some research and be aware that it's not a bullshit, not like us, atheists, Christians are more aware of existence of Satan worshippers, however what Christians not aware of is that both religions created by Jesuits/templar hijacked catholic church and just two sides of same coin and Jesuits who invented fake Christianity history 500 years ago also invented satanism and control both parties, pushing Christianity to poor people and Satanism to rich and manipulating both, while secretly top of Jesuits are scientists/neo alchemists who worship sun, moon and comet know as baphomet or Muhammed or Jesus or Lucifer or Satan.
I remember an old joke: they say if you play a windows 95 CD backwards it'll pay satanic messages. That's nothing! If you play it forwards it'll install windows 95!
No, that would be Windows ME.
@@penfold7800 depends how old you are! I had windows 95 corrupt a hard drive beyond recovery in my 386 so the first version wasn't perfect either. (It wasn't hardware issue, reformat and installed DR-DOS 7.02 with windows 3.11 and it was fine)
All hail Linux.
@@shannonhill3356 this was before I discovered Linux, though tbf I mostly played games on that DOS machine
Pen Fold darn you beat me too it
Finnish band Tarot used backmasking on their 1986 album 'Spell of Iron'. On the song "Pharao" there's a message in finnish, that says "I knew you'd listen to this backwards you pervert" :D
I don't have anything to add, just nice to see another Tarot fan around here :)
Pervert~
"Arvasin että kuuntelet tätä takaperin perversi!"
I just had to do it, I had to grab it and reverse in Audacity!
mm mm
Heads up, you’d turntable is likely not spinning at the correct RPM. A few off for audio isn’t really noticeable but for computer code it shifts the frequency enough to create an issue
It's most likely not spot on. Although it was loading some files. But combined with ingrained dirt, warping on the discs and other artifacts, I just didn't have time to run through all the motions.
wow/flutter probably matters too. i'd recommend finding someone with a technics 1200 or something else with very consistent speed.
Nothing more than a guess but I'd bet RIAA EQ doesn't help
@@downthegardenpath i would have to assume they accounted for that, and in theory equalization cancels itself out perfectly.
I wonder if you could record some code that would tell the exact rpm of a turntable in code encoded on the vinyl itself
2:39 always reminds me of the time we were traveling home from school on the school bus and we were allowed to pass tapes to the driver to play and someone passed up the coach a C64 computer tape....
I hate when i'm listening to a record then all of a sudden i become a disciple of the antichrist
It helps if you're already a disciple to be honest.
But they make it so tempting: 6 weeks vacation, full medical and dental, lucrative stock options, and a corner office with air conditioning. :-)
Today we have the SJWs, back then we had the Evangelicals and "Moral Majority" as it were.
People need to stop giving ideological loonies power. Especially private power.
@Mike L Listening to Styx forward is bad enough.
i worked too hard to be a mere underling damnit!
My favorite backmasking tape was something along the lines of "This record is reversible, but time is not" I remember finding it on a flashvideo website many eons ago...
ELO I believe that was?
@@RickinBaltimore may well have been. It was so many years ago now, back in the good ol' days of yore. :D
That was an ELO track. Can't remember which album though! It then goes "turn back! Turn back!"
Another ELO track! Fire on High.
Another ELO track: Fire on High, from the album Face the Music. That was their first response to the incident mentioned in the video where they were accused of being satanists. If you listen to the whole message, it's a deliberately overblown and ominous instruction to stop wasting your limited time on Earth listening to records backwards.
Re. The Inner City Unit NewAnatomy program, I wrote it.. you didn't look at the source code did you for the easter egg competition within and easter egg withing a... oh you know :) the program was cut directly to the lathe from a Spectrum. The version on the vinyl is the last version, the other version was one I sent to a stupid person who couldn't get the program to load from vinyl hense the filename and my bit of code to see if I'd filled the Spectrum up yet. I still have an emulated version running on my phone for those times when we do gigs today and people ask about it..
If you look at the sleeve the data track is listed as "Hectic Electric" and the album liner notes say "for more information colour your screen spectrum" I claimed it as "Avant Garde electronic" on the publishing info for the tracks on the album in a desperate royalty grabbing move.. There was a sticker on early copies proclaiming "free spectrum program" but we removed it because people were getting shirty in record shops demanding their free cassette :)
You didn't try "0" on the menu.. ;)
Thanks for the fun review!
Steve - ICU

the ends says obj
Me and a few friend were heavily into 48k Spectrums ( & I.C.U.) & actually got this to work back in the day. i would love to go back & check it out again. I also didnt know that you "Steve" wrote it. Well done old bean.Dingwalls were the best gigs. especially the ones with Bob Calvert. x
Hi Steve, never knew that was your doing. Is there no limit to your talent and deviousness. Hope yer well and love to the missus.
PS, are we gonna get a Krankschaft game on the next album?
@@merlin5476 I can send you a tzx file that will run on an emulator if you want..
@@StevePond it would be a really nice gesture if you could leave a link to a clean mp3 of the original track. Personally, I dislike emulators. But I guess they're useful to get these nostalgic games in more peoples hands than actual machines got produced.x
Information Society deserves to be on this list. They did multiple things with hidden data tracks, including starting an online scavenger hunt to piece together a file that decompresses to an extra song not available directly on the album.
When i was a kid, we found a copy of "Leonard Nimoy Sings." So of course we played it backwards. All 5 of us there clearly heard "Shatner loves Goats."
Shame you aint got now.. thats worth big bux
What slander! He loves *horses!*
30:20 ;)
10 PRINT "we're no strangers to love"
20 FOR I=1 TO 1000: NEXT I
30 PRINT "you know the rules and so do i"
40 FOR I=1 TO 1000: NEXT I
...
130 PRINT "never gonna let you down"
...
250 GO TO 10
;)
actually it's a moving lobster picture, flashing border and text
I love lobsters, best of all, the crustaceans. I love lobsters THEY'RE OUR FRIENDS
290 REM LobstaligaNerd 2
I love this
Probably an easter egg about "Rock Lobster"
How do I load this? I tried with Fuse but returns "B Integer Out Of Range, 175:2"
Ricardo Martinez
I’ve paused the video then loaded audacity.
Set input as direct audio out and pressed play on TH-cam and record in audacity.
That was how I extracted the audio track.
Then I used fuse to load the audio track.
Nilbog is Goblin spelled backwards!
My first encounter with code tracks was the last track on Information Society's second album. Decoding that modem conversation with a loudspeaker, phone, and modem was quite the challenge. Later a simple DSP program made it so much simpler.
A later album included a treasure hunt to find a download of the hidden track, but by the time I even heard the album existed, the links you were supposed to follow were all dead.
At last, someone covering the Thompson Twins Adventure. I remember having this, but not where I got it from. It was a nightmare to rip then as you'd expect. Too light on the stylus and it skated on the flexi, too heavy and the record would just not spin properly. Somehow I did eventually manage to get it loaded. Wasn't worth the hassle!!
If this Spectrum code at the end is an ad for Square Space I'm going to be pissed, lol.
what was the program?
@@isaace436 I'm still waiting as well....
@@JonAllenMichael from 30:23 to the end of the video is audio code.
@@nyko4972 right, but what was the code?
It is not just cracks, pops and hiss that make loading programs from vinyl difficult. There is also postprocessing circuitry that assumes the vinyl contains music and is not that helpful with computer binary data. And the second problem is that the vinyl doesn't reproduce the sharp edges of the digital signal very well, leading to the Spectrum having trouble with the signal. In the original ZX Spectrum manual you can even read that "using hi-fi equipment to load Spectrum programs isn't recommended and may lead to poor results".
technology connections: Please don't call it a vinyl! >:(
nostalgia nerd: ha ha, vynil go spin!
SupaPhly lmaoo was thinking this the whole time
VINYL FTW.
@@Nostalgianerd What do you call a record that's not made of PVC... a Shellac?
So glad I wasnt the only one who thought this. Lol
@@jamesfcarter What's wrong with "LP" or simply just "record", like we used to. I bet the young pups will eventually learn to adapt. I think the biggest issue if we were able to go back in time, would really be that you wouldn't get what anyone was saying and they wouldn't understand you either, even though you would supposedly be speaking the same language.
- anyway, I admit that I find myself calling it vinyl too.
there is an album by Isao Tomita Called "The Bermuda Triangle" Which,accordi thelinr notes, has a coded message. I quote - "Each side of this record contains coded data in the form of certain sound effects. The message can be recovered if the electrical signal from the record is interfaced with the input of a micro Computer programmed to the TARBEL system". That's all they tell you. They don't specify what type of Micro Computer to use, but as the album was released in 1979, it can't be very advanced. as i've never heard of TARBEL, I have no idea whether it works , or what the coded message is.
Rick rolling in 2020, feels refreshing I guess compared to getting ‘stick bugged’
Hey, at least stick bugs are cute.
that one game of among us that ends with the imposter yelling "get stick bugged idiots" as you slam the airlock button.
You forgot to add "lol" at the end of "stick bugged".
@@Sivanot Implying that Rick Astley isn't kawaii as fuck.
Stick bug's meme had a life span as long as a regular bug. Rick Ashley is immortal.
First time I noticed a hidden Easter Egg was around 2000. Nostalgia just kicked in for me. My theory is nostalgia kicks in when you turn 30 and look back to your teens and twens. I found a sampler covering songs from 1984. One of the songs was by the band Propaganda "Dr. Mabuse", prduced by Trevor Horn. I noticed a strange sounding part towards the climax. I dumped the song into Cool Edit 95 (that's already nostalgia by now :-) and reversed it. The song starts with "Why does it hurt when my heart misses the beat", sung by Claudia Brücken. Listening to the reversed played part it reveals "Warum schmerzt es, wenn mein Herz den Schlag verpasst", the literal translation of "Why does it hurt when my heart missed the beat" from the beginning of the song.
th-cam.com/video/bHKm4mLTLs8/w-d-xo.html
That was a LLOR-KCIR ESREVER you did there.
Now let's GUBKCITS ESREVER
Tip for cleaning vinyl records. Get some wood glue and pour it over the audio areas. It won't stick to the vinyl but it will trap any dirt or other gubbins. So when you peel it off you get a perfectly clean album :)
Heartware is one of the coolest band names ever. And that cover of the electronic etched heart was wicked amazing!
Very surprising it is from 1986, it seems so sleek and modern!
A important tip with Flexidscs: On most record players you need to place some sort of weight on the center area of the disc such a coin to prevent the disc from slipping around on the platter (you may even want to tape the coin down). Also, Flexidiscs aren’t designed to last very long so it was common to copy contents to a cassette tape so you don’t wear down the Flexidisc so as to become unplayable.
The easiest way to hide a message in an audio track is with Morse code. If it blends well with the music and locks with the beat it'll be noticed by the few listeners who know the code but ignored by nearly everyone else. These days you don't even need to know Morse code to get the hidden message, you can just decode it with an app on your phone.
If you do it in higher frequencies us oldies with our burnt out ears from crt use won't hear it at all...
@@freeculture You mean like those Musak systems that add a screeching tone above 18kHz to discourage teens from loitering around the more posh stores in a mall.
*YYZ by Rush intensifies*
Red Dwarf had that episode Backwards, and if you play the scene where Rimmer and Kryten are being fired, backwards, it reveals a hidden message slagging you off.
The Atari st final fight exe actually has a huge rant in it.
I opened it in an ascii editor when I was a kid and was shocked.
What was it? I need to know now!
@@SylveonTrapito It's in one of Larry Bundy's Fact Hunt videos.
@@antster1983 oh you are right. I think it was a horrible mensage of a developer that hate the game.
Agustin Goicoechea Here’s the video: th-cam.com/video/2ndNSRy04YI/w-d-xo.html
Agustin Goicoechea No, wait, here’s the one! Richard Aplin on Final Fight. But you can still watch the other to see Aplin’s other ramblings...
th-cam.com/video/sKk36WKWGUs/w-d-xo.html
Contrary to what you said in your video, it is indeed possible to create a spectrum loader that loads different code both forwards and backwards. The trick to doing so is designing a custom loader - you would still need the BASIC program at the end of the tape but using the absolute minimum timings, no pauses and using the old machine code REM statement trick could make it small enough to be nearly imperceivable, then the rest is all in the 'mixed' loader.
"Urusei Yatsura" is not just coincidence. It seems the Scottish band members watched some Japanese anime and they fell in love with anime named "Urusei Yatsura".
The Japanese manga exists already since 1978. It is possible when the members of the band want start together, they need a name for it. And i think one of the members suggest because many of then watched UY series together, they choose this for band name. Really strange way to choose name.
There is nothing elsewhere, the name is not just fell out of the sky. It's already well known in Japan and under okatus.
Actually it kinda is. The band members probably thought a Japanese name would sound cool so they went with that. Urusee Yatsura literally means "Obnoxious Bastards", totally fitting the theme of a rogue-like band that were prevalent in the 80s.
@@astral2048 they were a 90s band part of the tail end of Britpop and using twee imagery. The name was more likely chosen ironically because they weren't that.
I actually remeber hearing an interview of them at the radio back then, of course their name is tied to the anime, it would be quite the coincidence if it were not. IIRC they came to know about the anime when they did a trip in Japan (but don't quote me on this).
BTW, in my country (which is Italy) Urusey Yatsura is widely known, it was aired and re-run numerous times since the 80s.
Down here they aired every relevant anime of the 70s and 80s.
Odd. "Otaku" is actual Japanese (basically translates to "nerd"), whereas "okatu" seems to be a bastardization of "otaku" and is crammed into the Urban Dictionary and some social groups. I'm guessing someone must have trolled "okatu" into existence. Shame on them. :P
@@dhruel That, or the OP just misspelled otaku.
Anyone else really satisfied with him unwrapping the cassette......oh memories!
MMm shiny shiny staticness
I used to do it more carefully, with a sharp knife around the edges, and kept the wrap for a while, because they were nice :D
I still open up my new music CD's and vinyls so carefully that I can keep them in the original shrinkwrap for added protection...
@@MetalTrabant You need a shrink-wrap machine, but then the temptation to flog off the stuff as 'never opened' might get you..
4:50 did they seriously name their band after that anime. I wonder what legal battles they had to deal with
There was a band called Rival Schools, named after the Capcom game. They didnt get any lawsuits from the company
No they just called it "Obnoxious Bastards". There's no serious issue with that. Just a cool Japanese name.
But anime have soundtrack releases, so it's potentially in the same market. I wouldn't recommend it, even if time, place and popularity meaning they aren't likely to conflict in practice. What if they became really famous? They'd be open to legal trouble, and worse, people who weren't in the know would find out they're nerds!
Glad you mentioned the CD extras at the end. This was a wild video, seeing these bonus programs on tape, and even vinyl! Definitely a precursor to those CD-ROM extras like Primus's Tales From The Punchbowl, Incubus's S.C.I.E.N.C.E., or Deftones's White Pony.
Also, that sucks about your Radiohead boxset. How did they manage to ship that without the vinyl? 🤦
There's been quite a few tracks I heard on the radio that clearly had something recorded backwards in it, so the odd chance they played it twice (community radio that is), I managed to grab and play it backwards. Turns out, it was far too hilarious. I forgot what it said, and don't even remember the title of the song either, much less the album or name of the group/artist.
it was likely the dont drink holy water from the toilet satanic message
There was a game on the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer that displayed a rant against a popular tape copying program while being copied with it. The author was aware that this software displayed the data on the screen while reading the tape signal. That copying software, incidentally, would not copy itself except that the older version would copy the newer version.
oremoR nohJ, em llik tsum uoy emag eht niw ot.
.nhoJ
John Oreo
Profile pic checks out.
Decino?
@@Eliasdbr heck!
I was about to mention that, though it's a bit outside the ambit of this particular video, in 1994, Mike Oldfield released "The Songs of Distant Earth" (with help from Arthur C. Clarke) drawing inspiration from Clarke's novel of the same title, which included additional content for Apple Macintosh computers of that era. Unfortunately, though I have the CD (now in storage a couple states away), I've never been able to check out the extra content, having never owned a (working) Mac of that particular vintage....
Spoilers for those who can't figure it out:
11:01 mmm good day to you sir
28:52 Not now, isn't Paul Gary or isn't it?
30:23 LobstalgiaNerd!
30:46 WHAT?
31:06 MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS
28:52 is a Red Dwarf quote, from the episode 'Backwards'. "Nodnol? It's in Bulgaria, isn't it?"
Just a tangential addendum: Not vinyl *or* cassette, but I used to have a promotional floppy disc (the big, actually floppy kind) from the band Information Society containing a game. I get it mixed up with the Stranglers one, but I believe it was a text-only game, and… well, it’s been awhile so I can’t really recall any details. Good luck tracking this one down!
I thought for sure when I clicked on this video, that what was going to happen that some album had recorded what appears to be spectrum code on it, but nobody in the last 30 years could get it to load. And then it turned out that it was just recorded backwards, and that you'd be the first person to discover it.
Superb stuff, and bonus points for all the classic old audio gear. Also, that wooden TV on the Old Grey Whistle Test is fantastic.
You can easily create code that runs backwards by including a comment character mid-way along each line.
10 PRINT "HELLO" # 01 OTOG 02
20 GOTO 10 # "OLLEH" TNIRP 01
That's not how it works. You have to put the code lines in backwards
20 GOTO 10
10 PRINT "HELLO"
And we didn't get to talk about the binary code of each ascii character being inverted
@@Eliasdbr Yeah I didn't know enough about how the Spectrum does character encoding to try that!
I'm sure it would be possible to write a program that does something backwards and forwards, but it's not this. The characters are encoded bit by bit, so it would need to make sense in that way. Just typing the same characters but in reverse wouldn't encode the characters to be read backwards (a 1 is a 1, and if played backwards is not 1).
To stop flexi-discs being dragged by the needle we used to place a half-empty can (Quatro, Top Deck, or Tizer probably) on the label.
There was a little dotted circle telling you to put a coin on it. It generally worked. Is half the label big enough to accommodate a can?
This game will not sell records. In fact it's on pretty shaky ground....
I can't find any reference to it online, but I recall reading (maybe in JimBob's first autobiography) that the intro to 'A Perfect Day to Drop the Bomb' is actually the albums' entire Drum Machine program - which in the late 80s used a tape instead of floppy. I'm not 100% sure on that, but it's defintely never been succesfully loaded into any hardware since release.
If you wanted binary data that could be different forwards and backwards, use a data type where the header contains start address and data length. You would then have a header at the start and the end of the binary segment, with 2 sets of data in the middle. I haven't dug any deeper than this but data types like that do exist.
I like how you pronounced “aural quest” as “oral quest”.. which sounds something totally different
I thought the word was pronounced ow-rul, but apparently it isn't, it's pronounced the same as oral.
@@MarkTheMorose its pronounced ah-rahl.
@@z.s.n. non-American accents exist bruh
@@astral2048 no way, are you sure..?
Billy Bollockhead sounds like a sidekick to Frank Sidebottom
I really enjoyed all the hidden messages in the subtitles. Thank you.
Urusei Yatsura has a song called "Hello Tiger" about the character Lum from the anime also called Urusei Yatsura.
Wow! Super interesting to see what was probably the first lyric video in history.
“Another one bites the dust” is great backwards. It clearly says “it’s fun to smoke marijuana”. I was going to bring up The ELO record but you beat me to it! ;) there are many many more.
I told my friends about how I played a recording of the mp3 backwards on my moms computer back in the early 2000s and found the marijuana message. They didn't believe me.
Well after reading your comment, I searched for it. I did found a video talking about it.
But it's really subtle, was this ever confirmed ? or just audio hallucination :)
Im pretty sure thats just your brain creating that phrase due to you having being told it was there. Its just random noise and your brain is trying to make sense of it by searching your memory for possible matches. Same thing as seeing images in tv static or hearing voices in white noise.
I've just checked, and especially the part starting at 2:20 in the track does sound a lot like that phrase when reversed. The fact that the song contains reversed sounds of instruments, does make it clear that they had the means to reverse audio, and makes it somewhat plausible that they tried to craft a part of the song to produce a funny message when played backwards.
I watched a video a long time ago about statistical coincidence and the dangers of human pattern matching (probably a Royal Institution?) The video talked about how if you have enough random data you will eventually find a match for any pattern, and if you are looking for any pattern you don't need much random data at all, and that humans are overly biased to finding patterns in general.
This original example was a particularly strong demonstration of the psychological effect of looking for something specific, they said this part had a message backwards, played it forwards, then backwards without telling you what the message was, then told you the message. They did this for several songs, and it was striking how unintelligible the message was before being told what it was and how obvious it was after, for every one.
The band is named after the 80's anime and manga "Urusei Yatsura" whose author, Rumiko Takahashi, also wrote "Ranma 1/2" and "Inuyasha".
Fun fact: the beginning of Slayer's Hell Awaits has "join us...join us" hidden backwards
@@nonyabidness8676 Well I'm sure it was just cool at the time. It's a line from Evil Dead
Oo roo say yaht soo ruh
Urusei Yatsura is a manga and anime series by Takahashi Rumiko. It's her first big hit from the early 1980s. Viz is currently publishing the manga in omnibus format and finally to completion.
The title means loosely translated "Those Obnoxious Aliens." This is where tiger striped bikini clad Lum-chan comes from.
One of my favorite Bill Hicks quotes: "Did you know that if you play records backwards........... you're an asshole?"
The album "Peace & Love, Inc" by Information Society in the last track named "300bps n, 8, 1 (terminal mode or ascii download)" contained a text message you could read by connecting your hi-fi to your modem. The message talked about an eventfull night on tour for the band.
Track: th-cam.com/video/fcLBGadsu3s/w-d-xo.html
Text: www.textfiles.com/humor/is_story.txt
I tried to find out what the easter egg was, I downloaded the audio and converted it to .tzx so that it would work on one of the Sinclair emulators. Sadly, it didn't work. The only way it could work is to put the audio on a cassette and play it on real hardware. I really hope someone will do that and post their findings on the internet.
i was hoping someone would be in this comments linking to a video of this program working but i guess not
Well, better late than never I guess? Just saw this video and I noticed the Easter Egg at the end too and tried to see if I could get it to work. Though keep in mind that I have never used a computer old enough to load from audio cassettes in person before and I don't even have a Sinclair, I used an emulator for this. I have no idea if I even correctly converted the audio file to .tap (was not able to get a conversion to .txz or directly loading the .wav file itself to work) in full or if it's corrupted or has pieces missing since it's oddly silent when it looks like it should have sound. Regardless though, I did get it to load and run a program. I... have no idea what this is supposed to be though, I am new to this channel so is this a running gag or reference to something?
th-cam.com/video/iUaiSCPijls/w-d-xo.html
When you mused about the (im)possibility of having software that could load both forward and backward, I thought that you could probably just put another program recorded backwards after a full program recorded normally. It would be cool if that could be something along the lines of the famous Karateka easter egg, where the unlabeled side of the disk had the game rendered upside down recorded on it.
Somehow i reckon the end code is another Rick Roll...
I know my inner nerd would have loved to have these albums at home as a kid.
During the 2000's some CD albums and samplers here in Germany did similar things.
Like I remember when I put Mama's CD of Garret Gates' Anyone of Us in the computer I could actually watch the music video of the second or third song as QuickTime video.
I thought this was amazing back then and still is.
Good day to you too Nostalgia Nerd! Also nice Red Dwarf reference ;)
That's interesting video about tape recorders for a PC based console I wouldn't know much about. Honestly, I had no idea it was going be about the ZX Spectrum as I was expecting loading up video games backwards like from the last level or somewhat corrupted loading. Interesting that musicians use to make a small game or have their music on a tape or vinyl before having their music featured in video games like in Burnout, WWE or Forza.
At 2:25 you said "a California bill" when the article you show on screen says "Arkansas State Senate".
Unfortunately the message hidden on the red screen where some unknown program code was included was partially obscured by those popup things that are on what I believe is referred to as the 'end slate' section of the video. I really wish people would take care not to have their end slate obscure some message.
"WHAT?"
"MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS"
I'd like to know what the code is.
If you play any nickelback song backwards it still sounds like crap.
They Sound Better Backwards.
i like Nickelback
Backmasking is most well known in vinyl, but the only time I've heard it for real, was on cassette. Back in the 90s I knew this guy had an old Fisher Price "baby's first cassette player" thing that had a reverse play button. The only tape we could find backmasking on was from the Christian rock band Petra. It was a warbling, high-pitched, male voice, clearly saying "Oh Satan, you are the holiest, we worship you." This wasn't like one of those Beatles records - if you played the tape forward you couldn't tell there was anything going on.
@3:26 DANG YOU NOSTALGIA NERD!
DAAAANG YOU!
* Waves fist at Nostalgia Nerd *
You did it again, but there will be NO THIRD TIME!
I'm always fascinated by hidden gems like these. I never knew you could encode computer programs in purely audio form, and especially not on vinyl!
Oh man. Hidden code in the video about hidden code.... that is so meta!
Surely someone is going to load it? I bet its Rick again
That vinyl is the only format that can't reliably load those old programs absolutely pleases me. Man, where are those vinyl snobs now?
It's probably the record player, not the record. If it could be recorded on cassette tape as audio, there's no reason a record couldn't handle it. It just doesn't make sense.
IIRC reel-to-reel tape (at least at 15ips) is superior to vinyl; I'm almost positive. The dynamic range is *definitely* wider. There are physical limitations to vinyl as a medium that tape doesn't suffer from.
The notion that vinyl is inherently superior to CD is absurd, and anyone who asserts that without other qualifying statements simply has no idea what they're talking about.
Professionals sometimes even used (and some still use) 30ips, as the signal-to-noise ratio is higher. However, 15ips could have improved low-frequency response compared to 30 on 1/4" tape. 30ips on 1/2" tape is even better than that (think of the amount of tape involved here lol). I don't know if commercial reel-to-reel releases were available in even 15ips, though; I think they were typically 7.5ips on 1/4in tape. All that was squarely before my time (and I'm 42 😂).
There's nothing wrong with enjoying vinyl records as a hobby, of course, but any superiority over CDs was generally due to more care being taken during recording and mastering.
I'm dying to know whether you ended up getting your OK Computer vinyls in the end?
I can say from personal experience that the records were packaged separately to the box, which most of the retail staff didn't know, resulting in people going home and opening a shiny presentation box with no vinyl anywhere to be seen. Took me two visits back to HMV to sort it out and get both the box and clean records.
@@davidellis4031 this is weird, I have no idea why they'd do that
Nice Information Society also has something like this on their album "Peace and Love, Inc", it's more that you have to run it through a modem in order to see it.
I remember spending many hours trying to get my mac to read that track.. playing it on my discman and holding the headphones to the handset of the phone so the modem would hear the tones, etc. I don't think I ever got it to work perfectly, but I do recall being able to read a portion of the text file.
Don't call me Shirley....... what you going to do about the 3 missing records......>???
21:10 I kinda wish you showed some of your progress after looking at a walkthrough? This game intrigues me :-)
EDIT: Oh you linked working images in the description, I guess I can just use those if I'm curious enough! Thanks :-)
OMG!!! I still have that CD album from Urusei Yatsura!!! And I don't have any CD player anymore! 😄😄😄
One of the first things I did when I got my first PC was to record me saying my name, listening to it backwards and then recording myself saying my name backwards, reverse it and listen to how I would say my name as if I had a stroke.
Spectacular video. Nostalgic PC hardware
Not a computer program, but something some artists did on vinyl was to put a pair of parallel grooves on one side of the record. Monty Python did this and didn't tell anyone, just to mess with listeners. Their joke being that you'd listen to Side 2, enjoy it, and at some point listen to it later and perhaps end up listening to a completely different version of Side 2 and be like, "Huh? That's not what I was listening to before!"
Obviously this gag could only work on a record and not a cassette or CD.
Rush did this with a promo 7" single titled "Rush 'N' Roulette," where you drop the needle and randomly get one of several tracks.
Bands also liked to put stuff in the run-out groove of the record so that if you didn't have an auto-return feature on the arm, the needle would stay in the groove as it went in a loop over and over until you manually stopped it.
Not quite Zork levels of humour in the deaths in that "adventure" game was it? :D
This is amazing I knew about hidden messages but putting entire computer programs on a vinyl...
Also reminds me how you can hide stuff in jpg hexcode.
With the original title, I was expecting that you'd have found an example that only worked if you reversed the tape (or record).
Freaked out by the subtitles. Was not ready for that. Well played...
You're welcome.
Have you ever heard Michael Jackson's "Earthsong" backwards???
It's on TH-cam. Check it out.
Would it become a good song?
I didn't think playing the code in reverse would do anything. What I did think was that you found backmasked code that when reversed would do something.
Got to say bro,m: the British. Lol
Watching the Show “TimeLine” where the last time they discovered a Dinosaur Turd, bro it was 5 miles underground, they had to use the latest escalator technology to uncover it :) then they just cover it back...and moved on with life :)
I’m joking ya know :)
The End : jokes aside, love your channel, rare stuff.
Take this into account: you should do an episode with “Kim Justice” you guys have so much in common, I would love go see an episode you guys talking / debating the past, especially in British Land 80’s lol
(this is a journey.. into sound) We had so many competing systems in the USA at the time it just wasn't possible to have cool things like this. One of the many strengths of the sinclair.
3:30. My first time seeing this from you, and your work is pure artistic mastery.
Agreed 😂👍
when i saw the track name "300bps 8,N,1" on Information Society's "Peace and Love, Inc." i called a friend and had him set up his modem to receive an incoming call... i put my phone's handset near my stereo's speaker and called him back when it was done... and was amazed to find out he saw quite a bit of text displayed on his screen... a wild on-tour story written by Kurt Harland Valaquen... we both felt quite accomplished having unearthed this hidden fanservice treasure long before it became public knowledge, and i posted the text on a few local dial-up bulletin boards... Kurt would later offer up a similar track on "Don't Be Afraid"... peak nerdery.
You can tell somebody if they've had a migraine by this analogy. That is EXACTLY what a visual migraine looks like.
And here I was only hoping to find out there is a zx game that played backwards splashed an registration letter or similar
Great episode and even better then I hoped for!
10:50 Subtitle jokes. Yes please!
Glad you talked about Aural Sculpture/Quest! It was a delight to hear the intro track by Greenfield. RIP.
Despite how bad you said it was, I still wanna check it out. It's a cool enough album to warrant owning twice, if nothing else.
"Help I'm trapped in TH-cam"
*intensifies*
Nguyên Minh Hồ - I saw that too in the closed captions and laughed, then started making plans to get him out of the you tubes. May have to get the Mario Bros. involved.
Don't forget a more recent example, just within this last year!
The special episode of _Black Mirror_ entitled _Bandersnatch_ had playable ZX-Spectrum code. I don't recall if there was more than one, but for sure it had the "nozedive" game featured in the movie.
"Mind your own business" 😄
I love it how the thumbnail for the video shows a vintage polish turntable, the Unitra G-620 "Fryderyk", a decent machine, but far from perfect. I rebuilt one about half a year ago.
man WHY you got to do stuff so new? .... SHOW us an 8-Track with program on it for UNIX / IBM ????? ... Ma Bell ? .... :-D
This video deserves an instant like simply because of the mention of Urusei Yatsura. One of my favourite bands of the era. Thank you, indeed. 😊 ❤️
Ah, you'd need a 4 track tape player to get reversed audio.
writing code that is functional both backward and forward has been a pursuit of mine for many years
Ok, so yeah .. I'm going to plug my phone into my ZX Next later, and find out what that program is at the end of your video. Nice addition. 🙂👍
Would like to know what it was! I wish I could find someone to fix up my +2.
@@Kholaslittlespot1 - I tried this evening, but the output from my phone and tablet isn't being picked up by the Next. I'll need to set up my mixer which has a pre-amp and feed it through that to boost the signal.
RetroSteveUK cool mate, good effort. Let us know how you get on!
Maybe it could be recorded and boosted in something like Audacity/soundforge?
@@Kholaslittlespot1 - The setup with my mixer worked and I was able to load the program into my ZX Next via the ear/mic socket as if it were a tape. It's an animated, waving lobster with some text about liking crustaceans. I took a 48k snapshot which will load into Speccy emulators: app.box.com/s/d2cunbliz9qyubnnpx136beu4q4t5uxa
@@RetroSteveUK Haha, awesome. Good job. Curiosity satiated!
I never had a problem loading any vinyl ZX spectrum code. Just use one channel and disable RIAA correction (Not all phono preamps can do that though). Then just finetune the volume to the input. Of course a high quality turntable helps too...