I thought I recognised the address of Koethener Str. 38 shown in the opening credits of the game. The address is for Hansa Studios in Berlin. The record sleeve says that the album was remixed at Hansa. The studio is still there and has legendary status since it was used by the likes of Bowie, U2, Depeche Mode etc. Back in 1986 the area was essentially wasteland very close to the Berlin Wall with a fully working experimental MagLev train service nearby. Nice.
Tangerine Dream used the Hansa studio on their 1979 Force Majeure release and I believe also their follow-up Tangram release. Pretty amazing their address is in a very rare video game!
He could have put more Drama into it, like Will Smith's dramatic reading of Hanson's "Ummbop". soundcloud.com/nathan-betzen/dramatic-mmmbop-by-will-smith
Had he read the, "I appreciate the Commodore directly?", with a rising pitch at the end to make it sound like a really emphatic question, I would have shot coffee out of my nose.
Hi, I'm the author of WAV-PRG and Audiotap, and I'm glad those tools have been used for such an amazing discovery! I'm curious, how have those been used? A guess is that the WAV file has been converted to a clean TAP with WAV-PRG, so that the resulting file can be converted with Audiotap to a higher-quality WAV without the original WAV's volume drops.
Ah hello. I downloaded the source and compiled both of those on my ryzen system running debian 9 recently so that I could convert my tapes to tap files for my new TheC64 maxi. Worked great cheers. I even packaged them up as Debian packages after compiling them.
These hidden programs on vinyl records are incredible! Thank you for sharing! To save some time with future hidden tracks, use a 1543-II disk drive to read the audio directly from the hidden track. You'll need to disable JiffyDos or the fast load from Super Snapshot as it interferes with reading hidden tracks on vinyl records. Once the track is loaded, you can save it to tape directly and avoid messing around with audio fidelity programs. Back to reality now, I don't think any of those comments came from people who have ever used a Commodore computer.
A number of years back, I undertook to rescue old games I'd programmed for the Vic-20. Many of the games were never seen again after the day I made them, because the recording made to tape was corrupted at the time of recording (owing, no doubt, to dodgy tapes). I did manage to rescue one of them, and see my creation for the first time in over 30 years. But I was perpetually confounded by this one problem: Those WAV-to-TAP apps all, universally, refused to deal reasonably with corruption in the audio. What do I mean by "reasonably"? What you'd expect is that the app would proceed to convert the whole thing and either make a note of the corrupt bytes or just fill them in with a default byte so the user could hand-fix them later (should be easy, given a Basic program). Instead, the moment they detect corruption, they flat out stop. They give you nothing. Meaning the only way to make use of them is to find the audio corruption in Audacity/Audition and figure out how to fix it yourself! This was an EXCRUCIATING process. And I doubt any of these apps have been upgraded from their circa-Windows98-era state since then. I'll add that one of the games I made worked exactly like this Piggy game. It was a racing game that leveraged Basic's built-in up-scrolling to scroll the "racetrack" up, with randomly-weaving walls just like in this game. Every once in a while the game would generate a pit-stop where one could repair damage accumulated from running into debris. But honestly, on the Vic-20 in Basic, everything was so slow that it was only a "game" in theory. Still, not bad for ~9 years old, I think.
I used these tools too for creating a more "robust" versio of whatever was on my casettes (they weren't originally mine, I inherited them with a used C-64 in 1999), I could still get most of them to work, even if the original casette failed to load on C64, which would indicate that they were still in pretty good shape considering the time... I was expecting to maybe rescue a couple of them, but I got most of them (well, over 75% for sure) to work! It would be great if someone worked on some kind of error-correction for these applications though... I never even tried to find what was wrong with those I couldn't convert, but I can believe it to be pretty damn hard when the application doesn't even say where exactly did it fail....
The dattasette plug is not propriety. It's a standard 0.156" pitch card edge connector. They just made a custom cover for it. You would need to put the linear signal through a shaper though. A hex schmidt inverter chip does the job. (And it's what they used in the datasette recorder) the only other electronics in the datasette is a pair of simple classA amplifiers. The metal cassette mechanism probably cost ten times more than all the other bits taken together. It's no wonder they just gave them away once the 1541 was released.
The greatest difference of digital vs analog serial signal lies in the interpretation. In the case of the C64 tape protocol, the signal on the tape is analog, consisting of different wavelengths, and positive and negative part waves. The tape drive does not parse the signal to another format, but it is amplified quite a lot, superimposed on a roughly 2,5V DC offset and fed to the C64 in the TTL levels domain, rather well defined between 0 and 5V, likely through a Schmitt trigger. For recording, the C64 again generates a flow of long and short pulses that are between 0 and 5V, and the tape drive filters out the DC offset which results a signal with positive and negative part waves, better suited for analog recording. There are multiple types of datassette replacements and their unbalanced interface with the C64 may be designed a wee bit different between models, though. Some other computers of that era were made to utilize standard music tape recorders, and the DC offset to adapt for TTL was generated inside the computer while the recorders handled signal levels roughly between +/-2V max. If you were to tap a headset to the C64 tape interface at the datassette plug, the signal would be obnoxiously loud. I made such a contraption to be able to adjust the azimuth of the datassette head, and I used a 1K potentiometer in the line to have a tolerable sound level. Instead, on some other computers the tape interface handles signal levels that fit into HiFi line/headset level definitions.
Those comments were so funny, everybody so keen to offer completely wrong expertise. Btw I'm sure you already know this, but if anyone is wondering, you CAN use audio directly from a computer/phone, not into the port on the C64 but through the tape deck using one of those cheap tape adapters that were designed for playing CDs through the cassette drive of car stereos back in the day. But it can be just as fiddly with getting the correct volume etc as it was trying to record to tape, and would have made for a more confusing and less authentic experience for the video.
I was in Berlin during that time frame. Amigas were the big thing, but you could still find an occasional C-64 program or magazine. Pig jokes were a big thing in Germany back then.
1986 was after the Amiga 1000 had launched, but before the Amiga 500/2000. Units were out there but they weren't very common yet, it had not conquered the bedroom with a very meagre amount of games. Most people would still have a C64 or maybe a C128 unless they were really passionate about graphical design.
Neee Amiga war da doch noch in den Kinderschuhen. Erst mit dem A500 1987 fing es an und ich erinnere mich in der Demo Szene hat es noch länger gedauert bis sich der Amiga durchgesetzt hatte.
@@Notir072 Ja ich habe auch noch einen C64 II mit schwarzen Tasten. Schön die EPYX Games mit freunden sind heute immer noch so gut wie damals. Und einen Amiga 1200 aber die Tastatur ist ohne Funktion aktuell. Wird aber auch noch wieder gemacht ;)
13:13 That "Ja" was just pronounced perfectly. It litterally confused my as my brain immideately switched to "I'm watching a native language video"-mode.
Yeah, it's too long even for abbreviations to handle. It was either done by manually hacking the BASIC code in a monitor, or more likely, with an optimization program that would automatically pack BASIC code.
But, how is this handled by the interpreter, if any characters exceeding the max line length of 80 characters are simply ignored? You could manipulate the next line link (which is a machine address) to point into the midst of the line, but you'd still have to have a binary zero to indicate the end of the line in order to advance to this position in memory (at which point it would be more practical to just have a normal new line). May be worth another episode investigating the trick used for this.
@@noland65 The interpreter is okay with up to ~255 characters on a line, but the editor enforces an 80-character limit upon input, which is 2 * 40 character lines on the screen. The VIC-20 handles up to 88 characters, 4 * 22 character rows. And I'm pretty sure the C128 allows 160 characters (2 * 80 or 4 * 40). You're right that it would probably make for an interesting episode.
Funny thing about 255 (or was it 254?) max line lengths: I was remembering this too, but wasn't really sure and much too lazy to lookup the original documentation or a source listing. So a bit of Google-ing convinced me that I must have been missremembering this (maybe confusing this with the max string length) and that anything exceeding 80 chars is simply ignored. (However, the BASIC input buffer is certainly longer.) Which is, why this may be really a video worthwhile and it would be also complementing some of your previous content quite naturally with a convenient link to this episode. PS: May be also interesting, why do it at all? (E.g., long IF clauses, sparing a GOTO jump)
@@MrGoatflakes Damn, I've had just taken a sip from my cup when I came across that comment. Now I have to swipe the screen clear... Looks like some people ragetyped comments on that last video because "There is someone wrong on the intertubes! I must know it, because I'm sure of it!" 🤣 (Edited a typo to not look as stupid as those ragetypers 😘)
@@handsomebrick Audiophiles know that the wood of the pencil will produce a richer sound, but the plastic of the pen will attract static charge, causing a background hum on the audio.
Josef yep, that was a thing. I had an older friend who was a HAM radio junkie that had his C64 linked to his kit that would use a terminal program to “chat” with others far away over the radio and swap programs
Haha, with QAM, you could easily stuff in 8 bits for every 1 bit you had here and probably a bit more. I assume that is what later tape drives used. I don't think you'd have been able to do QAM back then, even had it been known about, because of limitations on audio to digital conversion.
Yes, in the 1980s there were radio and TV shows "where the host would describe a program, instruct the audience to connect a cassette tape recorder to the radio or TV and then broadcast the program over the airwaves in audio format. In former Soviet Union, mostly in Russia and Ukraine unauthorised radio operators (so-called radio hooligans) often exchanged software from cassette tapes for Spectrum and other popular computers by broadcasting it. Another unusual method which was used by some magazines were 7" 33⅓ rpm 'flexidisc' records, not the hard vinyl ones, which could be played on a standard record player. These disks were known under various trademarked names including 'Floppy ROM', 'Flexisoft', and 'Discoflex'." (quote from Wikipedia) Aside from broadcast stations, ham radio operators have been using digital modes for two-way communications for decades. Any way that you can modulate bits of data in the audio bandwidth and then modulate a radio carrier frequency. These include FSK methods like RTTY (used by US military since the 1930s) and packet, PSK, and now MFSK such as JT65 (used in moonbounce paths since 2003). To my knowledge these methods were/are used mostly to communicate via text "chat", not computer programs or games.
What you needed to do was output the vinyl directly to a VCR with a mono signal, playback the recording on a CRT then at the 88th minute switch the output to the flux capacitor.
Every C64 Datasette owner knows that rule 1 is you keep both the Datasette and the C64 as far away from each other as possible, and also both as far away from the monitor/tv as possible - this is why you experience some errors. You should also leave the room and not come back until it has finished loading; peeking through the doorway is allowed, but if you leave the door open then you are asking for trouble - the C64 knows.
man, those comments at the very end crack me up. when i saw them in the beginning i thought you made them up just for fun, but i guess they're actually real?!
cheater00 I was thinking he pasted all those real(ly stupid) comments into a Markov chain generator that then produced similar text for comedic effect.
So many critics. Clearly all the people saying you should of plugged the Record Player into the C64 have no clue. And as for the pencil, please. Great Job.
I know, right? A lot of older computers did have a simple audio jack interface, but if you've ever used a Datasette on a Commodore, you would know that's not the case with these machines.
The c64 was a great machine but some of the design decisions smacked of weirdness/corporate control. Having the bus come out directly into the diskdrive works well but the apple plug in card method is much more useful and carried over into every future PC. Sure there where other pcs with plug in cards but the success of the apple showed it was a much better way to do it. Same with the audio. By not having a simple mic input they limited other peripherals such as different tape units. I know why they did that as the quality of tape players/recorders and cassettes was usually really terrible back then. I remember having special tape recorders for the apple ][ for example. I can only assume commodore was trying to limit the nightmare of having substandard recording equipment and playback from causing an issue with their machine. Making it digital from the tape player to the pc helps a lot with that.
skillet pan exactly that. Back in the day I had a TI-99 with a cassette cord, and it was very unreliable at saving and retrieving data with it. It would often take multiple tries to load something with adjustments of the tape player’s volume and tone between tries, especially with purchased tapes and tapes I got from other people who saved with different tape recorders. The Commodore Vic 20 datasette didn’t have that problem, and the C-64 was made to me backwards compatible with the already existing VIC-20 peripherals.
Until your videos, I had never heard of any such thing as a computer program encoded on a vinyl record. Thanks for your efforts in technological archaeology!
I've got one of those cassette port to 1/8" audio jack adapters you mentioned. I've never messed with it because all the software I enjoy is already on floppy disk, but I'm told that using one isn't always so simple. Apparently inverted phase recordings are an issue to contend with, along with level adjustments. Plus, it makes more sense to me to make one clean recording of the vinyl copy to something that you can pause and rewind with ease, instead of manually moving the turntable stylus each time you get a bad read into the C64.
Good idea to clean out that Marantz. I felt a pang of loss when it came on the screen. I think a piece of metal fell into mine through the grill on top because it fried one day a few years ago. I loved that thing.
I'm not sure why I love these type of stories. I guess it might be how it reflects a time when computers were still thought to be amazing. I tried making a line in on a datasette btw by just poking around while running some small tape calibration program, wich turned out just fine. There are clear instructions out there, but the number of revisions of the datasette are surprisingly plentiful, so they might not apply.
Looking at the C64 BASIC, I can see that this game is based on the example program "Grand Prix" from the book "Easy Programming for the Commodore 64" by Ian Stewart and Robin Jones 1983 (pages 143-145). The C64 BASIC (shown at about 14;47) uses the same program structure and variable names as the book example, although they've changed the graphics, added sound and joystick support.
On the pencil thing, I believe European and apparently also Canadian pencils fit nicely into a cassette. I remember a discussion somewhere, where it was determined that US pencils are of a different size.
The only way to write line 9 is to manually enter the command token numbers into BASIC program memory and manually enter the "next line pointer" at the start of the line. Using command abbreviations is not enough to enter the entire line - I tried it. As long as all the single byte tokens and data are less than 80 bytes, C-64 can handle it as a single command line. The line moves the sprite, presumably checks for collision in a subroutine, and then counts out a delay according to the player's speed setting, and then draws the next line of road boundaries. Ordinarily you would use this "compression" trick to perform a task as quickly as possible since the OS is not spending time calculating next program line locations and such. With the included delay loop I don't really see the point, except there may be (slightly) less lag between moving the sprite and determining a collision. It's the main routine of the entire game so I guess the programmer wanted it all to happen within the same line. Maybe it was used simply to reduce the over all size of the program.
There was a basic compression program from one of the magazines, I don't recall which one, that could put several lines together. I think 240 characters is the limit the C=64 can read. (But 80 is the limit you can enter with the editor)
Love this! My older brother was an 80's AV club kid, so we had the same early cassette based C64 (growing up in western New York state). I typed school reports on it, well into the 90's. However, my favorite moment was my best friend and I hiding one of the game tapes in his little sisters Teddy Ruxpin and scaring the crap out of her.
You've just reminded me that I had a tape adaptor for me C64 so it could use an ordinary tape player. I'm not sure why I needed it because I had a C2N tape player too but I'm getting flashbacks to how difficult it was to use compared to the Commodore unit. I expect Laxity or some other group will have a cracked and infinite lives/no collision detection version on csdb within a day or two.
I can't believe all the ignorant comments on the other video. I mean good grief take two minutes to Google C64 cassette operation before you assume the video creator is an idiot and end up making yourself look like an idiot. Anyway, keep up the great work on your channel.
Christopher Gaul classic Dunning-Kruger situation! It's like a meeting full of junior programmers who think everyone else is stupid, so they keep interrupting to say "why not just load everything into memory?" even if that was the first thing you tried and ruled out.
To be fair, the C64 is somewhat unique in its cassette connection. Most other 8 bit computers had analog plugs where the user could use commodity tape players.
What set me up was the astonishing "high quality" of language in those comments. I've been wondering if they came out of a rather bad text generator when I heared them here. Anyway, always remember: "There is someone wrong on the interwebs! I'm sure of it, because I know it better!" 😁
[01:29] *THANKS* for the creaky old computer sounds! You really don't need to apologize for something that's actually quite a lovely part of the ambience. Now, if only you could upload the smells of old electronics....
Love your videos, it's a wonderful trip down digital memory lane. The digital archeology is Very appreciated. as well. Nothing like more than 40 years later learning even more about the field which so enthralled me so many years ago. The seventies were such a time of dicscovery and not just for computers!
17:26 ...And we descend into the madness of frustrated wannabe engineer-detectives. Not much better than the Chinglish user manuals of obscure black-market products!
Just before I watched this video I was listening to the 'La màquina de escribir' symphony. I've got to say I heard the typewriter when you played the sound effects on the listing. Dappa dappa dappa (ding)
There's a similar game on the TRS-80 called "Roadrace". You choose how wide the road you want. You keep racing on the scrolling track until you crash. And it tells you how far you've gone. Also programmed in Basic.
I really appreciated the last comments in the video. They were very clear and descriptive. "Maybe you should them listen in order advice that the program is easier while cable is simple to have audio better understand the C64. " :-)
When coding in basic using abbreviations the basic line can be longer when listed. To edit it you must completely code the basic line again using abbreviations. (Without using tools) 😂.
@@MrThomashorst It depends on what commands are being abbreviated. They will all be expanded when listed no matter how long the output is. But as Paul said, you cannot edit the line as-is. You have to re-enter the whole line with the abbreviations. There was a contest in some old 8 bit computer magazine for the best game done in the fewest number of lines that also had to keep some kind of score. The winner was a game surprisingly similar to "Piggy": You were a skier skiing down the slope trying to avoid "poles" (the "pipe" character if I remember correctly, "|"). Anyway, the winning program also had to be entered with abbreviations: 80 characters is the max that an input line can be when doing it this way, but the expanded output will potentially be much longer.
@@MrThomashorst 80 characters - 2 screen lines - is the standard maximum length of code lines in BASIC on the C64 (and some other machines). Using P +O for POKE or ? for PRINT you can, depending on command density get up to about 120-140 characters into a line of code. Above that you have to write tokenised commands directly into memory using tools or doing it with POKE in direct mode - quite the effort for some few more bytes. I remember doing that one or two times in the early 90´s. Odd way of programming but it enabled you to put quite complex loops into one line. More a proof of concept than an effective and efficient way of programming. Anyway, the BASIC itself allowed for longer lines to exist, the screen editor just gave you no options to input them -> "80 characters ought to be enough for any problem you encounter when writing a program" 😇
@@ThereIsOnly1ArcNinja Generally its a novelty, but for something like this where they're trying to cram it into a limited amount of space on an album, the savings in code density can actually matter. Keep in mind that this record only has the program on the 2nd pressing of it, so when they were laying it out originally its not like they were reserving space for a computer track on there. The difference between the program taking up 1:45 instead of 2:00 could make or break the idea.
@@JeremyLevi In this particular case I totally agree. Especially when you take the low datarate of native tape programs - i.e. no fastload - into account. The the runout groove with following lock groove couldn't be much smaller on this record. The artists should have performed there songs a tiny bit faster. 😉 *Just kidding*
@@8_Bit I am also not sure if Krautrock is really very regarded as derogatory nowadays. At least I started to look into Northern Lite again; Back To The Rools live is a good one here on TH-cam. Thanks for the videos. I got here dueto interest in 6502 assembly and old computers, probably JUST before someone posted this on hacker news, which caused a surge in visitors ;-). On a sidenote: BIC or HB pencils, they all work!... But don't try 2B, as they are prone to stain your hands in the process ;-P. J/K
Back in the day, i used one of these special casette adapters with audio input jack to hook up my first portable CD player to my car radio. I think those might work here too.
I too used Bic pens to wind tapes back in the day (in South Africa). As an aside, in primary school we switched from pencils to pens in the 5th grade (or 'standard 3' as it was called then)
Thank you for doing this, the video is great. It's such a pity that so much effort was put into making such a mediocre game. This style of game that I know as a 'Canyon Game' are pretty much the easiest sort of games that we could make on the Commodore Pet that we used to have. A few variables and just poking and peeking and printing the edge of the canyon, and letting the computer automatically do the scrolling for you. I was never that good at programming but there were ways of making these sorts of games quite fun for a while, 'sprite' momentum and such.
Simple and mediocre as these games may seem in this day and age, back then, stuff like this would've seemed like marvelous magic! Remember, this was a time when graphical capabilities were still rather primitive...we were just beginning to scratch the surface of what a computer could do. Imagine yourself as a teenager back then and you are somehow able to get one of these "hidden track" programs off of your vinyl record and playing on your C64...you're going to feel as though you just perfomed a bit of awesome wizardry! 😅😅😅😅
Shame a serious game or demo wasn't released in assembly on a flip side. Not much you can do with what is essentially a short song's worth and in the limitations of basic...
I enjoy what you're doing. I once had a collection of old Mac's going back to 512k, MacPlus 4k RAM on a 500mb hard drive (the size of a small toaster) and up to Quadras. I networked them with the "phone line" wiring. Never found a practical use. Fun to play with despite how clunky they seem compared to this (old) iMac I'm writing on. Never did Commodores and such.
That was freaking awesome!!! It's like finding ancient buried treasures. In high school (circa 1986) we had to program a game that had an object fly across the screen and drop a bomb on objects below. This reminds me of doing that. If only I had hidden it in some album somewhere. :D
@@makipri Actually no, while the information was digital most of them used an analog signal and just a standard tape player. You often had to spend time playing with the volume to get them to work. Commodore used a digital signal, it was not a standard tape player and fiddling was not needed.
@@makipri Einkerl is right, I have an Atari 800 it just uses any regular tape player, to load a tape program it takes about 5 minutes of messing with the volume to get it just right for each tape.
a b I had a TI-99 back in the day and it had the same issue. Datasette on the VIC-20 and C-64 always worked right the first time. Cassette cables to use with a tape recorder you already had was much cheaper, though
a b I know I lived that era and tape doesn’t mean the signal isn’t digital. I know since I’ve written my own program to convert a binary file to audio signal that I transfer to my CBM pet these days.
Just googled now and found uCassette. Looks like an audio jack to c64 tape input. I've also seen retro man cave and maybe LGR use a small device that loads tap files etc from an sd/flash card.
If memory does serve me, the Datasette used a nonstandard playback speed. Meaning, if the piece on the LP was audio engineered to be transferred to a cassette and to be loaded from there, the data track will have the wrong speed and pitch when fed directly. (So you'd probably need a special device employing buffers in order to transform the audio into standard Datasette format, which might be just what uCasette is doing, @skillet pan mentioned earlier.)
I would have never thought it would be possible to put a computer program on a record using only sound.... But it makes sense that if you have a program that can read the highs and lows of sound as 0 and 1 then it would be totally possible..... Learned something new today
@@8_Bit Hey, don't worry about it, as nice as it would've been, I'm just glad I could contribute =) edit: and it was great how you also showed how it affects the audio-data (for lack of finding a better word just now...) in audio file editor. Sorry for my poor english here, I'm trying to type this in between working with linux installation and taking breaks :) I'm a bit out of focus....
That is one hell of a stereo you have there. I own 2 Marantz 2230's and even though they only output 30 Watts per channel, they have no problem powering my 250 Watt RMS Kef107 loudspeakers.
I was in Berlin not so long ago and, coincidentally, staying in a hotel a stones throw from Koethener Str and walking past that street every day; in 1986, one end of that street would have stopped at the Berlin wall - it was only meters inside West Berlin - the area looks _very_ different now, but I'll bet that building looks quite similar to how it did then. (In 1986, I was much farther away in Gütersloh, well inside what was, at the time, West Germany, pre reunification)
I really love your videos, the mix of hardware is just brilliant and if most of the commenter would listen to you more carefully then most of the questions were unnecessary :)
Many other computers from the era did have plain audio jacks for cassette data (apple, tandy). I think the many comments that suggest direct audio input are thinking of those computers, but they were often difficult to use when loading programs, requiring fiddling with the volume levels differently for each tape due to variations in tape quality and audio levels. The commodore tape drive converts to digital internally and then sends the digital signal to the computer.
Two main hardware modifications exist to get around this. One inserts the audio signal into the circuitry inside the cassette deck and lets the native hardware there do the work. The other builds a DAC adapter to plug into the cassette port. Many emulators accept the TAP files, and there are phone apps that will allow you to play them through an aux cord. But again, this requires some modification to take audio directly.
First time encountering this channel. Looks like a tamer 'AvE' for old school tech. I was birthed '86 and thx to my late father (RIP) was fortunately exposed to a variety of older tech along with the latest PC tech over the years. He even managed to acquire a school's cache of old 10lb monochrome DOS laptops and humongous disk drives that used *A4-paper-sized 10mb disks that were nearly 2cm thick. He had all that stuff stacked in the back of the garage for years. Anyway, I will be back as soon as you upload a new vid!
For those people talking about radio transmitted software: We had this in the Netherlands too. It was called Basicode III. This was in the early 80's. You would sit by your radio recording for an hour hoping the radio would not shift it's frequency or that there was bad weather coming. First they would transmit a general interpreter, the Basicode III program, for all different homecomputers at that time. I can still hear them announce every different version of Basicode III for each computer: "En dan volgt nu het Basicode III programma voor de BBC". Or the C64, Acorn, MSX, or even the "Robby Computer" which was a DIY homecomputer my dad built at that time. It didn't even have a proper keyboard at first, and the incredible 1k amount of RAM. After all of the versions they would transmit that weeks software, which would run on all of the mentioned computers using the Basicode III interpreter. This interpreter made it easy for programmers, so they would not have to write the same slightly altered software for each computer. So you had to wait for the right interpreter first, and then record the software. I was always dissapointed with what I got. Got me into programming myself. ;-)
Very interesting, I'm not sure I had heard of BASICCODE before. I enjoyed reading the Wikipedia article about it just now: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE
@@8_Bit You know what? My dad keeps asking if I want the Robby computer now that he is cleaning out his attic. Until a few weeks ago I didn't have the space for it, but I'll ask him to bring it over. I guess he is still proud of what he made! Etched the circuitboards himself and all. I can take some pictures and send them to you if you're interested.
@@janvoogt6089 It'd be very interesting to learn more about this "Robby Computer" - I don't see anything online about it, but perhaps this design had different names in different countries? You can email me through the About tab on my channel's page, thanks!
Commodore dataset also uses a pwm-like audio protocol. A 0 and a 1 both have the save logic levels, but with different durations. A 1 is 0.75T and a 0 is 0.25T. Therefore, a regular audio source won’t work.
Using basic short commands like you're using to list the program it's also possible to cram more than 2 lines of codes into a single basic line. So no special tools were needed. Editing the line was something else though. That was not possible and one had to basically re-enter the line (modified if needed) using all the short codes. It was also possible to modify a listing by adding special characters after a REM statement that actually controlled the screen: different colours and even blanking the screen or hiding a listing was possible by using those special characters.
Ah, yes, I remember that!! You listed a program and the text colours would change, and then the screen would clear, etc. And you'd think "what's going on here?!"
th-cam.com/users/redirect?q=https%3A%2F%2Fpatreon.com%2F8BitShowAndTell&redir_token=f-d8KuYAml-Wf1mc0npZt0qAIHx8MTU3MzA1NTg1NkAxNTcyOTY5NDU2&event=video_description&v=ZAVuvXlbs4Q It's in his video description.
I use an mp32c64 adapter on my CBM PET to transfer the data directly from my laptop’s audio output to the cassette port! It works great. They might not be made anymore but you can occassionally find them on ebay. I’ve thought of producing my own units as well.
Ha, I think I actually made almost the exact same game on the C64 back in 1987 using the GameMaker program. It was a tank instead of a pig. I was trying to emulate the tank sequence from the game "Beach Head".
I really enjoyed both videos. This one mostly due to your doling out of skill, wisdom and common sense to all the 'experts.' Bravo. BTW- Nice receiver and Dual deck!
The true 'traditional' way to rewind cassettes manually is to insert the pen / pencil, then hold the pencil up and twirl the cassette around in the chosen direction as fast as possible :P
Thanks for this video (silly game from audio record). I think I'll stick to playing Minecraft as a '50 plus' fellow though (even though I used to program in the 80's, utilities and encryption), and listening to my weird music (weirder than most people's tastes).
Just to get back to the datassette. I haven't tried this but it might work (I do say might with a big question mark). There are those cassette adapters for plugging a CD or MP3 player into a cassette only system. They're a fake cassette with a magnetic head inside and a 1/8" jack. Might be worth trying.
Fun little thing about Elvis's TCB. Friends of Elvis were given a necklaces. For the Women it said TLC on top of a lighting bolt, and for the men it said TCB on top of the lighting bolt necklace.
I always used to use a BIC Pen to turn my tapes, it fits perfectly. :) (edit: commented before I watched the whole thing) That's a pretty good program for a record track. Reminds me of a skiing program I created on my first C64. I used the \ and / characters for the sides etc. Loved programming on that machine (especially machine language). They probably made line 9 long by simply using short forms for the commands. P + Shift O for Poke, GO + shift S for GOSUB etc... (funny how I still remember them). I bet when you do that, it just barely fits within two lines. They could have had software that tokenized the commands to make it all fit the 80 character limit I suppose. Editing would be a bitch though!!! LOL, gotta get it right the first time. ;) LMAO, that final sequence reading the comments was gold!!! XD
I thought I recognised the address of Koethener Str. 38 shown in the opening credits of the game. The address is for Hansa Studios in Berlin. The record sleeve says that the album was remixed at Hansa. The studio is still there and has legendary status since it was used by the likes of Bowie, U2, Depeche Mode etc. Back in 1986 the area was essentially wasteland very close to the Berlin Wall with a fully working experimental MagLev train service nearby. Nice.
Excellent info, thanks!
The MagLev train probably explains the wonky program recording on the record.
Tangerine Dream used the Hansa studio on their 1979 Force Majeure release and I believe also their follow-up Tangram release. Pretty amazing their address is in a very rare video game!
Lol!! Thank you for reading the posts of those people that think the c64 has an audio jack for the datasette! Those are hilarious!
The dramatic reading of the critical comments at the end made my morning.
He could have put more Drama into it, like Will Smith's dramatic reading of Hanson's "Ummbop". soundcloud.com/nathan-betzen/dramatic-mmmbop-by-will-smith
Had he read the, "I appreciate the Commodore directly?", with a rising pitch at the end to make it sound like a really emphatic question, I would have shot coffee out of my nose.
@KoivuTheHab So guess, what happened to Matthew? 😁
Sounds like my offshore colleagues technical chat and knowledge level
But did anyone actually manage to de-cipher those comments?
Thanks for "headphone warning", but I came to listen specifically that noise :)
Oh man, that sound floods my brain with nostalgia.
Are you also like me and you mentally play the "modem boot" noise when you find yourself speaking with a particularly dense individual?
@Dr. M. H. Absolutely. 😁
Hi, I'm the author of WAV-PRG and Audiotap, and I'm glad those tools have been used for such an amazing discovery! I'm curious, how have those been used? A guess is that the WAV file has been converted to a clean TAP with WAV-PRG, so that the resulting file can be converted with Audiotap to a higher-quality WAV without the original WAV's volume drops.
Hi, yes, that's exactly right. Great work with the tools, they were very useful!
Ah hello. I downloaded the source and compiled both of those on my ryzen system running debian 9 recently so that I could convert my tapes to tap files for my new TheC64 maxi. Worked great cheers. I even packaged them up as Debian packages after compiling them.
These hidden programs on vinyl records are incredible! Thank you for sharing! To save some time with future hidden tracks, use a 1543-II disk drive to read the audio directly from the hidden track. You'll need to disable JiffyDos or the fast load from Super Snapshot as it interferes with reading hidden tracks on vinyl records. Once the track is loaded, you can save it to tape directly and avoid messing around with audio fidelity programs.
Back to reality now, I don't think any of those comments came from people who have ever used a Commodore computer.
A number of years back, I undertook to rescue old games I'd programmed for the Vic-20. Many of the games were never seen again after the day I made them, because the recording made to tape was corrupted at the time of recording (owing, no doubt, to dodgy tapes). I did manage to rescue one of them, and see my creation for the first time in over 30 years. But I was perpetually confounded by this one problem: Those WAV-to-TAP apps all, universally, refused to deal reasonably with corruption in the audio. What do I mean by "reasonably"? What you'd expect is that the app would proceed to convert the whole thing and either make a note of the corrupt bytes or just fill them in with a default byte so the user could hand-fix them later (should be easy, given a Basic program). Instead, the moment they detect corruption, they flat out stop. They give you nothing. Meaning the only way to make use of them is to find the audio corruption in Audacity/Audition and figure out how to fix it yourself! This was an EXCRUCIATING process. And I doubt any of these apps have been upgraded from their circa-Windows98-era state since then.
I'll add that one of the games I made worked exactly like this Piggy game. It was a racing game that leveraged Basic's built-in up-scrolling to scroll the "racetrack" up, with randomly-weaving walls just like in this game. Every once in a while the game would generate a pit-stop where one could repair damage accumulated from running into debris. But honestly, on the Vic-20 in Basic, everything was so slow that it was only a "game" in theory. Still, not bad for ~9 years old, I think.
I used these tools too for creating a more "robust" versio of whatever was on my casettes (they weren't originally mine, I inherited them with a used C-64 in 1999), I could still get most of them to work, even if the original casette failed to load on C64, which would indicate that they were still in pretty good shape considering the time... I was expecting to maybe rescue a couple of them, but I got most of them (well, over 75% for sure) to work!
It would be great if someone worked on some kind of error-correction for these applications though... I never even tried to find what was wrong with those I couldn't convert, but I can believe it to be pretty damn hard when the application doesn't even say where exactly did it fail....
@Gernot Schrader Yes, but at the very least it could indicate the place of failure in the audio file.
The dattasette plug is not propriety. It's a standard 0.156" pitch card edge connector.
They just made a custom cover for it.
You would need to put the linear signal through a shaper though. A hex schmidt inverter chip does the job. (And it's what they used in the datasette recorder)
the only other electronics in the datasette is a pair of simple classA amplifiers.
The metal cassette mechanism probably cost ten times more than all the other bits taken together.
It's no wonder they just gave them away once the 1541 was released.
Haha! I love your own comment on the loading of the vinyl directly to the computer. Keep it up.
The greatest difference of digital vs analog serial signal lies in the interpretation.
In the case of the C64 tape protocol, the signal on the tape is analog, consisting of different wavelengths, and positive and negative part waves. The tape drive does not parse the signal to another format, but it is amplified quite a lot, superimposed on a roughly 2,5V DC offset and fed to the C64 in the TTL levels domain, rather well defined between 0 and 5V, likely through a Schmitt trigger.
For recording, the C64 again generates a flow of long and short pulses that are between 0 and 5V, and the tape drive filters out the DC offset which results a signal with positive and negative part waves, better suited for analog recording.
There are multiple types of datassette replacements and their unbalanced interface with the C64 may be designed a wee bit different between models, though.
Some other computers of that era were made to utilize standard music tape recorders, and the DC offset to adapt for TTL was generated inside the computer while the recorders handled signal levels roughly between +/-2V max.
If you were to tap a headset to the C64 tape interface at the datassette plug, the signal would be obnoxiously loud. I made such a contraption to be able to adjust the azimuth of the datassette head, and I used a 1K potentiometer in the line to have a tolerable sound level. Instead, on some other computers the tape interface handles signal levels that fit into HiFi line/headset level definitions.
Those comments were so funny, everybody so keen to offer completely wrong expertise.
Btw I'm sure you already know this, but if anyone is wondering, you CAN use audio directly from a computer/phone, not into the port on the C64 but through the tape deck using one of those cheap tape adapters that were designed for playing CDs through the cassette drive of car stereos back in the day. But it can be just as fiddly with getting the correct volume etc as it was trying to record to tape, and would have made for a more confusing and less authentic experience for the video.
I enjoy your channel. I'm a 45 year old guy. I dig this shit. I hope your channel grows. You deserve it. Cheers
Wouldn't it to cassette??
*WOULDN'T IT??*
I was in Berlin during that time frame. Amigas were the big thing, but you could still find an occasional C-64 program or magazine. Pig jokes were a big thing in Germany back then.
1986 was after the Amiga 1000 had launched, but before the Amiga 500/2000. Units were out there but they weren't very common yet, it had not conquered the bedroom with a very meagre amount of games. Most people would still have a C64 or maybe a C128 unless they were really passionate about graphical design.
I encounter pig jokes in Germany even nowadays. It’s cool since I love pigs.
Neee Amiga war da doch noch in den Kinderschuhen. Erst mit dem A500 1987 fing es an und ich erinnere mich in der Demo Szene hat es noch länger gedauert bis sich der Amiga durchgesetzt hatte.
@@marcoraap733 Genau, ich bekamm meinen Amiga 500 an Weinachten 87, und benutze dann immer noch intenziv meinen C64.
@@Notir072 Ja ich habe auch noch einen C64 II mit schwarzen Tasten. Schön die EPYX Games mit freunden sind heute immer noch so gut wie damals. Und einen Amiga 1200 aber die Tastatur ist ohne Funktion aktuell. Wird aber auch noch wieder gemacht ;)
"Zeit" = "Time"
"Nochmal? J/N" = "Once again? Y/N"
LOL he mispronounced “Zeit” there (in German, “ei” is pronounced like the English name for the letter “i”).
@@SilentSinnerInScarlet easier way to explain it is:
Sight, but pronounced with a Z instead of S.
Did you mean:
"Nochmal? (Noch mal?) J/N (Ja/Nein) = "Try again? Y/N (Yes/No)"
13:13
That "Ja" was just pronounced perfectly.
It litterally confused my as my brain immideately switched to "I'm watching a native language video"-mode.
As for line #9, is it possible it would fit using abbreviations for all of the BASIC commands? Probably not, by the look of it, though.
Yeah, it's too long even for abbreviations to handle. It was either done by manually hacking the BASIC code in a monitor, or more likely, with an optimization program that would automatically pack BASIC code.
But, how is this handled by the interpreter, if any characters exceeding the max line length of 80 characters are simply ignored? You could manipulate the next line link (which is a machine address) to point into the midst of the line, but you'd still have to have a binary zero to indicate the end of the line in order to advance to this position in memory (at which point it would be more practical to just have a normal new line).
May be worth another episode investigating the trick used for this.
@@noland65 The interpreter is okay with up to ~255 characters on a line, but the editor enforces an 80-character limit upon input, which is 2 * 40 character lines on the screen. The VIC-20 handles up to 88 characters, 4 * 22 character rows. And I'm pretty sure the C128 allows 160 characters (2 * 80 or 4 * 40). You're right that it would probably make for an interesting episode.
Funny thing about 255 (or was it 254?) max line lengths: I was remembering this too, but wasn't really sure and much too lazy to lookup the original documentation or a source listing. So a bit of Google-ing convinced me that I must have been missremembering this (maybe confusing this with the max string length) and that anything exceeding 80 chars is simply ignored. (However, the BASIC input buffer is certainly longer.)
Which is, why this may be really a video worthwhile and it would be also complementing some of your previous content quite naturally with a convenient link to this episode.
PS: May be also interesting, why do it at all? (E.g., long IF clauses, sparing a GOTO jump)
I owned and still own C128. I confirm keyboard input buffer is 160 chars on C128 instead of 80 of the C64
I cracked up at "a simple cable for releasing some tubers." Who knew all you needed was a potato to directly connect the data audio to the C64?
(Arnie voice) It's not a tuber!
Considering that a C64 is likely a tuber these days compared to modern computers...
Another piece of videogame history saved. That's awesome. Needs to be dumped on Lemon64 etc.
Why didn't you plug the pencil directly into the audio receiver?
Then you could have tuber it to sketch directly into C64 appreciated!
@@MrGoatflakes Damn, I've had just taken a sip from my cup when I came across that comment. Now I have to swipe the screen clear... Looks like some people ragetyped comments on that last video because "There is someone wrong on the intertubes! I must know it, because I'm sure of it!" 🤣
(Edited a typo to not look as stupid as those ragetypers 😘)
Don't you mean a BIC pen? It doesn't work with pencils.
@@handsomebrick Audiophiles know that the wood of the pencil will produce a richer sound, but the plastic of the pen will attract static charge, causing a background hum on the audio.
vcolinc Pencils are only compatible with cassettes.
"zeit" is time, "nochmal" is once again, ie start over.
in this case, nochmal means retry.
It is shortened down from "noch einmal" which directly translates to "again one more". So the closest in English I guess would be "one more time"
@@Zhixalom blablub blödsinn..."again one more" ROFL ^^ in diesem umfeld nochmal = retry
In this context it would be read as "again" as in "do you want to try again?" or "möchtest du es nochmal versuchen?".
@@EinKerl3554 typical german logic... there is no "again" in games, it is RETRY... end of story.
Some people just don't know how data gets into the C64
ZX users most likely, it had audio in.
Really interesting to see what they could do with just audio. I even heard that there were some radio amateur stations broadcasting entire games :-)
Josef yep, that was a thing. I had an older friend who was a HAM radio junkie that had his C64 linked to his kit that would use a terminal program to “chat” with others far away over the radio and swap programs
Haha, with QAM, you could easily stuff in 8 bits for every 1 bit you had here and probably a bit more. I assume that is what later tape drives used. I don't think you'd have been able to do QAM back then, even had it been known about, because of limitations on audio to digital conversion.
Also used for piracy
Yes, in the 1980s there were radio and TV shows "where the host would describe a program, instruct the audience to connect a cassette tape recorder to the radio or TV and then broadcast the program over the airwaves in audio format. In former Soviet Union, mostly in Russia and Ukraine unauthorised radio operators (so-called radio hooligans) often exchanged software from cassette tapes for Spectrum and other popular computers by broadcasting it.
Another unusual method which was used by some magazines were 7" 33⅓ rpm 'flexidisc' records, not the hard vinyl ones, which could be played on a standard record player. These disks were known under various trademarked names including 'Floppy ROM', 'Flexisoft', and 'Discoflex'." (quote from Wikipedia)
Aside from broadcast stations, ham radio operators have been using digital modes for two-way communications for decades. Any way that you can modulate bits of data in the audio bandwidth and then modulate a radio carrier frequency. These include FSK methods like RTTY (used by US military since the 1930s) and packet, PSK, and now MFSK such as JT65 (used in moonbounce paths since 2003). To my knowledge these methods were/are used mostly to communicate via text "chat", not computer programs or games.
@@jeromeglick Thanks for the detailed post
What you needed to do was output the vinyl directly to a VCR with a mono signal, playback the recording on a CRT then at the 88th minute switch the output to the flux capacitor.
You'd have to normalize the output from the left and right chrominance channels for that to work though.
@@vcolinc But after doing THAT you'll "see some serious shit" 😁
Every C64 Datasette owner knows that rule 1 is you keep both the Datasette and the C64 as far away from each other as possible, and also both as far away from the monitor/tv as possible - this is why you experience some errors. You should also leave the room and not come back until it has finished loading; peeking through the doorway is allowed, but if you leave the door open then you are asking for trouble - the C64 knows.
man, those comments at the very end crack me up. when i saw them in the beginning i thought you made them up just for fun, but i guess they're actually real?!
cheater00 I was thinking he pasted all those real(ly stupid) comments into a Markov chain generator that then produced similar text for comedic effect.
The bots are being trained
@@batlin I think that has to be the case. The usernames are even nonsensical.
@@batlin That's exactly what I did :) It's a Perl reimplementation of the first Markov chain program I ever encountered, called Niall on the Amiga.
So many critics. Clearly all the people saying you should of plugged the Record Player into the C64 have no clue. And as for the pencil, please. Great Job.
How do you of plug something anyway?
craig gilchrist *Should've
I know, right? A lot of older computers did have a simple audio jack interface, but if you've ever used a Datasette on a Commodore, you would know that's not the case with these machines.
The c64 was a great machine but some of the design decisions smacked of weirdness/corporate control. Having the bus come out directly into the diskdrive works well but the apple plug in card method is much more useful and carried over into every future PC. Sure there where other pcs with plug in cards but the success of the apple showed it was a much better way to do it. Same with the audio. By not having a simple mic input they limited other peripherals such as different tape units. I know why they did that as the quality of tape players/recorders and cassettes was usually really terrible back then. I remember having special tape recorders for the apple ][ for example. I can only assume commodore was trying to limit the nightmare of having substandard recording equipment and playback from causing an issue with their machine. Making it digital from the tape player to the pc helps a lot with that.
skillet pan exactly that. Back in the day I had a TI-99 with a cassette cord, and it was very unreliable at saving and retrieving data with it. It would often take multiple tries to load something with adjustments of the tape player’s volume and tone between tries, especially with purchased tapes and tapes I got from other people who saved with different tape recorders. The Commodore Vic 20 datasette didn’t have that problem, and the C-64 was made to me backwards compatible with the already existing VIC-20 peripherals.
An endless groove is generally known as a lock groove just so you know :)
Thanks for that blast from the past I started on a Vic-20 and spent hours on it.
Takin' Care of Business is also a song by late 70's - early 80's Canadian rock band BTO (Bachman-Turner Overdrive)
Until your videos, I had never heard of any such thing as a computer program encoded on a vinyl record. Thanks for your efforts in technological archaeology!
I've got one of those cassette port to 1/8" audio jack adapters you mentioned. I've never messed with it because all the software I enjoy is already on floppy disk, but I'm told that using one isn't always so simple. Apparently inverted phase recordings are an issue to contend with, along with level adjustments. Plus, it makes more sense to me to make one clean recording of the vinyl copy to something that you can pause and rewind with ease, instead of manually moving the turntable stylus each time you get a bad read into the C64.
Good idea to clean out that Marantz. I felt a pang of loss when it came on the screen. I think a piece of metal fell into mine through the grill on top because it fried one day a few years ago. I loved that thing.
I'm not sure why I love these type of stories. I guess it might be how it reflects a time when computers were still thought to be amazing.
I tried making a line in on a datasette btw by just poking around while running some small tape calibration program, wich turned out just fine. There are clear instructions out there, but the number of revisions of the datasette are surprisingly plentiful, so they might not apply.
OMG seeing that cassette station brings so many memories. I still get excited seeing the hardware...
Looking at the C64 BASIC, I can see that this game is based on the example program "Grand Prix" from the book "Easy Programming for the Commodore 64" by Ian Stewart and Robin Jones 1983 (pages 143-145). The C64 BASIC (shown at about 14;47) uses the same program structure and variable names as the book example, although they've changed the graphics, added sound and joystick support.
Nice find! Yes, it's been very heavily modified but a lot of the original program can still be found in there. Very interesting!
On the pencil thing, I believe European and apparently also Canadian pencils fit nicely into a cassette. I remember a discussion somewhere, where it was determined that US pencils are of a different size.
Metric pencils? :D
2B or not 2B?
The only way to write line 9 is to manually enter the command token numbers into BASIC program memory and manually enter the "next line pointer" at the start of the line. Using command abbreviations is not enough to enter the entire line - I tried it. As long as all the single byte tokens and data are less than 80 bytes, C-64 can handle it as a single command line. The line moves the sprite, presumably checks for collision in a subroutine, and then counts out a delay according to the player's speed setting, and then draws the next line of road boundaries. Ordinarily you would use this "compression" trick to perform a task as quickly as possible since the OS is not spending time calculating next program line locations and such. With the included delay loop I don't really see the point, except there may be (slightly) less lag between moving the sprite and determining a collision. It's the main routine of the entire game so I guess the programmer wanted it all to happen within the same line. Maybe it was used simply to reduce the over all size of the program.
There was a basic compression program from one of the magazines, I don't recall which one, that could put several lines together. I think 240 characters is the limit the C=64 can read. (But 80 is the limit you can enter with the editor)
Ah, so that's how it's done!!
Love this! My older brother was an 80's AV club kid, so we had the same early cassette based C64 (growing up in western New York state). I typed school reports on it, well into the 90's. However, my favorite moment was my best friend and I hiding one of the game tapes in his little sisters Teddy Ruxpin and scaring the crap out of her.
You've just reminded me that I had a tape adaptor for me C64 so it could use an ordinary tape player. I'm not sure why I needed it because I had a C2N tape player too but I'm getting flashbacks to how difficult it was to use compared to the Commodore unit.
I expect Laxity or some other group will have a cracked and infinite lives/no collision detection version on csdb within a day or two.
My money's on Aldi Industries.
I can't believe all the ignorant comments on the other video.
I mean good grief take two minutes to Google C64 cassette operation before you assume the video creator is an idiot and end up making yourself look like an idiot.
Anyway, keep up the great work on your channel.
Christopher Gaul classic Dunning-Kruger situation! It's like a meeting full of junior programmers who think everyone else is stupid, so they keep interrupting to say "why not just load everything into memory?" even if that was the first thing you tried and ruled out.
To be fair, the C64 is somewhat unique in its cassette connection. Most other 8 bit computers had analog plugs where the user could use commodity tape players.
@@wishusknight3009 which isn't an excuse for people being pompous pricks to the video creator based on their stupid assumptions.
What set me up was the astonishing "high quality" of language in those comments. I've been wondering if they came out of a rather bad text generator when I heared them here. Anyway, always remember: "There is someone wrong on the interwebs! I'm sure of it, because I know it better!" 😁
Ignorant kids accustomed to "fully digital barely physical" interactions, you were expecting any better?
[01:29] *THANKS* for the creaky old computer sounds!
You really don't need to apologize for something that's actually quite a lovely part of the ambience. Now, if only you could upload the smells of old electronics....
Love your videos, it's a wonderful trip down digital memory lane. The digital archeology is Very appreciated. as well. Nothing like more than 40 years later learning even more about the field which so enthralled me so many years ago. The seventies were such a time of dicscovery and not just for computers!
LoL, I got SO scared with his warning that I turned the volume way down...
Love these videos, Robin. Brilliant!
The last 40 seconds of so of this is absolutely wonderful.
17:26 ...And we descend into the madness of frustrated wannabe engineer-detectives. Not much better than the Chinglish user manuals of obscure black-market products!
Good job in archiving these obscure programs for posterity, someone in 100 years time will be thanking you!
I can't imagine why though.
@@handsomebrick someone will be interested in the history of computing for sure!
I have a lot of respect for the kind of archiving work you do. I don't know why, but these kinds of things are important to me.
Very very COOL! Thanks for that! Greetings, Doc64!
Just before I watched this video I was listening to the 'La màquina de escribir' symphony. I've got to say I heard the typewriter when you played the sound effects on the listing. Dappa dappa dappa (ding)
Sounds like it was trying to connect to the internet in the 90s. That sound I used to hate, now I miss it.
I always loved that sound! th-cam.com/video/DfbEytEUleQ/w-d-xo.html
I love that - whatever the topic of the video - there is always an old C64 game in the background.
You're now my favourite 8 bit channel. Love it each time you mention Canada!
There's a similar game on the TRS-80 called "Roadrace". You choose how wide the road you want. You keep racing on the scrolling track until you crash. And it tells you how far you've gone. Also programmed in Basic.
I really appreciated the last comments in the video. They were very clear and descriptive.
"Maybe you should them listen in order advice that the program is easier while cable is simple to have audio better understand the C64. " :-)
When coding in basic using abbreviations the basic line can be longer when listed. To edit it you must completely code the basic line again using abbreviations. (Without using tools) 😂.
But not as long as this lines ... you'll end up to 80 or 100odd chars ... at best.
@@MrThomashorst It depends on what commands are being abbreviated. They will all be expanded when listed no matter how long the output is. But as Paul said, you cannot edit the line as-is. You have to re-enter the whole line with the abbreviations. There was a contest in some old 8 bit computer magazine for the best game done in the fewest number of lines that also had to keep some kind of score. The winner was a game surprisingly similar to "Piggy": You were a skier skiing down the slope trying to avoid "poles" (the "pipe" character if I remember correctly, "|"). Anyway, the winning program also had to be entered with abbreviations: 80 characters is the max that an input line can be when doing it this way, but the expanded output will potentially be much longer.
@@MrThomashorst 80 characters - 2 screen lines - is the standard maximum length of code lines in BASIC on the C64 (and some other machines). Using P +O for POKE or ? for PRINT you can, depending on command density get up to about 120-140 characters into a line of code. Above that you have to write tokenised commands directly into memory using tools or doing it with POKE in direct mode - quite the effort for some few more bytes.
I remember doing that one or two times in the early 90´s.
Odd way of programming but it enabled you to put quite complex loops into one line. More a proof of concept than an effective and efficient way of programming.
Anyway, the BASIC itself allowed for longer lines to exist, the screen editor just gave you no options to input them -> "80 characters ought to be enough for any problem you encounter when writing a program" 😇
@@ThereIsOnly1ArcNinja Generally its a novelty, but for something like this where they're trying to cram it into a limited amount of space on an album, the savings in code density can actually matter. Keep in mind that this record only has the program on the 2nd pressing of it, so when they were laying it out originally its not like they were reserving space for a computer track on there. The difference between the program taking up 1:45 instead of 2:00 could make or break the idea.
@@JeremyLevi In this particular case I totally agree. Especially when you take the low datarate of native tape programs - i.e. no fastload - into account.
The the runout groove with following lock groove couldn't be much smaller on this record. The artists should have performed there songs a tiny bit faster. 😉 *Just kidding*
Hellmut Hattler is a 'famous' bass-player who is self-thought. Great to see the origins.
Yes, he's very good. I watched a 90 minute Kraan concert from 2005 here on TH-cam, it was excellent.
@@8_Bit I am also not sure if Krautrock is really very regarded as derogatory nowadays. At least I started to look into Northern Lite again; Back To The Rools live is a good one here on TH-cam.
Thanks for the videos. I got here dueto interest in 6502 assembly and old computers, probably JUST before someone posted this on hacker news, which caused a surge in visitors ;-).
On a sidenote: BIC or HB pencils, they all work!... But don't try 2B, as they are prone to stain your hands in the process ;-P. J/K
Thanks, I'm always interested in those things. I just bought an SD2IEC only for going once through Maniac Mansion! Works very fine btw.
I love your genuine reaction ... thank you very much for sharing your findings...
Hahaha! Bravo on the pencil. :)
I used to use a black Panda brand ballpen to rewind tapes.
Excellent video sir!
i actually still use a pencil and switching to bic pen now. learn something erryday
Back in the day, i used one of these special casette adapters with audio input jack to hook up my first portable CD player to my car radio. I think those might work here too.
I too used Bic pens to wind tapes back in the day (in South Africa). As an aside, in primary school we switched from pencils to pens in the 5th grade (or 'standard 3' as it was called then)
TH-cam commenters can be harsh. But I'll say nice things. Great video.
internet archive would probably be appreciative if you gave this to them
Hahahaha it’s pretty much a horizontal flappy bird. To think how much that game made 3 decades later.
This is true attic dweller spirit! Totaly love it! Thanks for thr content!
Thank you for doing this, the video is great. It's such a pity that so much effort was put into making such a mediocre game. This style of game that I know as a 'Canyon Game' are pretty much the easiest sort of games that we could make on the Commodore Pet that we used to have. A few variables and just poking and peeking and printing the edge of the canyon, and letting the computer automatically do the scrolling for you. I was never that good at programming but there were ways of making these sorts of games quite fun for a while, 'sprite' momentum and such.
Simple and mediocre as these games may seem in this day and age, back then, stuff like this would've seemed like marvelous magic! Remember, this was a time when graphical capabilities were still rather primitive...we were just beginning to scratch the surface of what a computer could do. Imagine yourself as a teenager back then and you are somehow able to get one of these "hidden track" programs off of your vinyl record and playing on your C64...you're going to feel as though you just perfomed a bit of awesome wizardry! 😅😅😅😅
Shame a serious game or demo wasn't released in assembly on a flip side. Not much you can do with what is essentially a short song's worth and in the limitations of basic...
Canyon Cruiser was one of my mom's favs on the c64. :D
why didn't you just install Audacity directly to the c64 instead of using the tape?
/sarcasm
It can not install.
It does not have an x86 CPU.
r/woooosh
@@_lun4r_ stop wooooshing he "/sarcasm"ed
I enjoy what you're doing. I once had a collection of old Mac's going back to 512k, MacPlus 4k RAM on a 500mb hard drive (the size of a small toaster) and up to Quadras. I networked them with the "phone line" wiring. Never found a practical use. Fun to play with despite how clunky they seem compared to this (old) iMac I'm writing on. Never did Commodores and such.
Enjoy your "scientific" approach to recording the program from the vinyl record to audio tape, very methodical! Keep up the great work!
Nice work retrieving and archiving that program for others to enjoy!
That was freaking awesome!!! It's like finding ancient buried treasures. In high school (circa 1986) we had to program a game that had an object fly across the screen and drop a bomb on objects below. This reminds me of doing that. If only I had hidden it in some album somewhere. :D
The digital Commodore cassette player was much more reliable and user friendly compared to the analog format everyone else used.
einkerl They’re all digital. Non-Commodore decks just required additional adapters and possibly level shifters.
@@makipri Actually no, while the information was digital most of them used an analog signal and just a standard tape player. You often had to spend time playing with the volume to get them to work. Commodore used a digital signal, it was not a standard tape player and fiddling was not needed.
@@makipri Einkerl is right, I have an Atari 800 it just uses any regular tape player, to load a tape program it takes about 5 minutes of messing with the volume to get it just right for each tape.
a b I had a TI-99 back in the day and it had the same issue. Datasette on the VIC-20 and C-64 always worked right the first time. Cassette cables to use with a tape recorder you already had was much cheaper, though
a b I know I lived that era and tape doesn’t mean the signal isn’t digital. I know since I’ve written my own program to convert a binary file to audio signal that I transfer to my CBM pet these days.
Have you tried using a CD to car cassette adapter? It would allow to stream the audacity output directly
unlike the cluebags from last comment, this supposedly does work
Just googled now and found uCassette. Looks like an audio jack to c64 tape input. I've also seen retro man cave and maybe LGR use a small device that loads tap files etc from an sd/flash card.
Use a cassette adapter plugged into a Bluetooth adapter. Boom! Load games to the C64 from your phone wirelessly.
If memory does serve me, the Datasette used a nonstandard playback speed. Meaning, if the piece on the LP was audio engineered to be transferred to a cassette and to be loaded from there, the data track will have the wrong speed and pitch when fed directly.
(So you'd probably need a special device employing buffers in order to transform the audio into standard Datasette format, which might be just what uCasette is doing, @skillet pan mentioned earlier.)
The tape speed is standard, but the protocol tolerates variations including wow and some flutter. It is, though, sensitive to polarity.
I would have never thought it would be possible to put a computer program on a record using only sound.... But it makes sense that if you have a program that can read the highs and lows of sound as 0 and 1 then it would be totally possible..... Learned something new today
That's so awesome! You used my tip for the .TAP file conversion, so cool! =)
Aha, thanks for the tip! I had remembered the idea, but couldn't find your comment again to give you a shout-out in the video :(
@@8_Bit Hey, don't worry about it, as nice as it would've been, I'm just glad I could contribute =)
edit: and it was great how you also showed how it affects the audio-data (for lack of finding a better word just now...) in audio file editor. Sorry for my poor english here, I'm trying to type this in between working with linux installation and taking breaks :) I'm a bit out of focus....
That is one hell of a stereo you have there. I own 2 Marantz 2230's and even though they only output 30 Watts per channel, they have no problem powering my 250 Watt RMS Kef107 loudspeakers.
I was in Berlin not so long ago and, coincidentally, staying in a hotel a stones throw from Koethener Str and walking past that street every day; in 1986, one end of that street would have stopped at the Berlin wall - it was only meters inside West Berlin - the area looks _very_ different now, but I'll bet that building looks quite similar to how it did then. (In 1986, I was much farther away in Gütersloh, well inside what was, at the time, West Germany, pre reunification)
I really love your videos, the mix of hardware is just brilliant and if most of the commenter would listen to you more carefully then most of the questions were unnecessary :)
Thanks! I'm glad to see you're getting videos out more often again, keep up the great work :)
Oh my fricking god 🤣 That ending was hilarious. Thank you, you made my day.
I live for these videos. Thank you for existing 🤘
Interesting that so many viewers of this channel don't seem to know the C64.
Many other computers from the era did have plain audio jacks for cassette data (apple, tandy). I think the many comments that suggest direct audio input are thinking of those computers, but they were often difficult to use when loading programs, requiring fiddling with the volume levels differently for each tape due to variations in tape quality and audio levels. The commodore tape drive converts to digital internally and then sends the digital signal to the computer.
Two main hardware modifications exist to get around this. One inserts the audio signal into the circuitry inside the cassette deck and lets the native hardware there do the work. The other builds a DAC adapter to plug into the cassette port. Many emulators accept the TAP files, and there are phone apps that will allow you to play them through an aux cord. But again, this requires some modification to take audio directly.
Again an amezing interesting extraction process.
First time encountering this channel. Looks like a tamer 'AvE' for old school tech. I was birthed '86 and thx to my late father (RIP) was fortunately exposed to a variety of older tech along with the latest PC tech over the years. He even managed to acquire a school's cache of old 10lb monochrome DOS laptops and humongous disk drives that used *A4-paper-sized 10mb disks that were nearly 2cm thick. He had all that stuff stacked in the back of the garage for years. Anyway, I will be back as soon as you upload a new vid!
For those people talking about radio transmitted software: We had this in the Netherlands too. It was called Basicode III. This was in the early 80's. You would sit by your radio recording for an hour hoping the radio would not shift it's frequency or that there was bad weather coming. First they would transmit a general interpreter, the Basicode III program, for all different homecomputers at that time. I can still hear them announce every different version of Basicode III for each computer: "En dan volgt nu het Basicode III programma voor de BBC". Or the C64, Acorn, MSX, or even the "Robby Computer" which was a DIY homecomputer my dad built at that time. It didn't even have a proper keyboard at first, and the incredible 1k amount of RAM. After all of the versions they would transmit that weeks software, which would run on all of the mentioned computers using the Basicode III interpreter. This interpreter made it easy for programmers, so they would not have to write the same slightly altered software for each computer. So you had to wait for the right interpreter first, and then record the software. I was always dissapointed with what I got. Got me into programming myself. ;-)
Very interesting, I'm not sure I had heard of BASICCODE before. I enjoyed reading the Wikipedia article about it just now: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE
@@8_Bit Thanks for the article! I wondered if I remembered all of it correctly as I was very young at that time. :-)
@@8_Bit You know what? My dad keeps asking if I want the Robby computer now that he is cleaning out his attic. Until a few weeks ago I didn't have the space for it, but I'll ask him to bring it over. I guess he is still proud of what he made! Etched the circuitboards himself and all. I can take some pictures and send them to you if you're interested.
@@janvoogt6089 It'd be very interesting to learn more about this "Robby Computer" - I don't see anything online about it, but perhaps this design had different names in different countries? You can email me through the About tab on my channel's page, thanks!
I have a 2270,those old Marantz' are awesome!Thanks for sharing!
Commodore dataset also uses a pwm-like audio protocol. A 0 and a 1 both have the save logic levels, but with different durations. A 1 is 0.75T and a 0 is 0.25T. Therefore, a regular audio source won’t work.
Using basic short commands like you're using to list the program it's also possible to cram more than 2 lines of codes into a single basic line. So no special tools were needed. Editing the line was something else though. That was not possible and one had to basically re-enter the line (modified if needed) using all the short codes.
It was also possible to modify a listing by adding special characters after a REM statement that actually controlled the screen: different colours and even blanking the screen or hiding a listing was possible by using those special characters.
Ah, yes, I remember that!! You listed a program and the text colours would change, and then the screen would clear, etc. And you'd think "what's going on here?!"
Robin had a video on basic shortcuts shenanigans already, check it out ;
I wholeheartedly love this, Robin!
Have you got your patreon page up yet? - 'cos as soon as you do, I'm in.
th-cam.com/users/redirect?q=https%3A%2F%2Fpatreon.com%2F8BitShowAndTell&redir_token=f-d8KuYAml-Wf1mc0npZt0qAIHx8MTU3MzA1NTg1NkAxNTcyOTY5NDU2&event=video_description&v=ZAVuvXlbs4Q
It's in his video description.
@@skilletpan5674 Thanks 👍
*That Guy has had a stroke*
I use an mp32c64 adapter on my CBM PET to transfer the data directly from my laptop’s audio output to the cassette port! It works great. They might not be made anymore but you can occassionally find them on ebay. I’ve thought of producing my own units as well.
Ha, I think I actually made almost the exact same game on the C64 back in 1987 using the GameMaker program. It was a tank instead of a pig. I was trying to emulate the tank sequence from the game "Beach Head".
"Releasing some tubers"
I just lost it. Who let the common taters out?
I really enjoyed both videos. This one mostly due to your doling out of skill, wisdom and common sense to all the 'experts.' Bravo. BTW- Nice receiver and Dual deck!
Wow, the archeology of early game history. Bravo!
The true 'traditional' way to rewind cassettes manually is to insert the pen / pencil, then hold the pencil up and twirl the cassette around in the chosen direction as fast as possible :P
Thanks for this video (silly game from audio record). I think I'll stick to playing Minecraft as a '50 plus' fellow though (even though I used to program in the 80's, utilities and encryption), and listening to my weird music (weirder than most people's tastes).
amazing as always - thanks for this, this has been a lot of fun.
Just to get back to the datassette. I haven't tried this but it might work (I do say might with a big question mark). There are those cassette adapters for plugging a CD or MP3 player into a cassette only system. They're a fake cassette with a magnetic head inside and a 1/8" jack. Might be worth trying.
Fun little thing about Elvis's TCB. Friends of Elvis were given a necklaces. For the Women it said TLC on top of a lighting bolt, and for the men it said TCB on top of the lighting bolt necklace.
I always used to use a BIC Pen to turn my tapes, it fits perfectly. :) (edit: commented before I watched the whole thing) That's a pretty good program for a record track. Reminds me of a skiing program I created on my first C64. I used the \ and / characters for the sides etc. Loved programming on that machine (especially machine language).
They probably made line 9 long by simply using short forms for the commands. P + Shift O for Poke, GO + shift S for GOSUB etc... (funny how I still remember them). I bet when you do that, it just barely fits within two lines. They could have had software that tokenized the commands to make it all fit the 80 character limit I suppose. Editing would be a bitch though!!! LOL, gotta get it right the first time. ;)
LMAO, that final sequence reading the comments was gold!!! XD