Back when the record came out, we decoded it too. I had a BBS running so I had two phone lines. One friend called the BBS number and held the telephone handset up to the speaker, we ran a simple terminal on the BBS machine and sent an ATA to it's modem. Boom, the text came across and we marveled at the cleverness of it.
I miss that era! I was co-sysop on 2 boards. One of our friends ran a C=64 board, when I was one of the last Commodore holdouts, but transitioning to PC. What a magical time!
Heck yea, late to the party but I ran Renegade and Oblivion/2 and blabla (pirate BBS) I was elated to get arrow keys working for ANSI menus and door games and whatnot, all self taught and hand ground. I decoded "most" of this at my friends house who had a big ass stereo and a PC like mine, I think 386/486 at the time, I said shhhh stfu we can't make any noise while this is going. There was some garble in the transmission but we shit ourselves when text started appearing on the screen after an ATA / ATD command and let it fly.
Oh this video here takes me back! It was in '93, if I recall. I had just got a Commodore 64 with money from a work bonus. I also had this CD and always wondered how I could have fed that data track into the damn thing. I actually went to an Information Society concert and after waiting for seemingly hours to leave once it ended, i somehow accidentally ran into Kurt! I was literally shocked, and I wanted to say something, but couldn't, because I knew it would be something corny and embarrassing. But in some nervous outburst, I said, "COMMODORE 64!" He looked at me in an unfamiliar way, and I said, "THE TRACK! THE DATA TRACK!" and I held out the CD jewel case that I had brought, hoping I could get him to sign. He realized this and reached for it. "I WANT TO DECODE THE TRACK!" He perked up and gave me a smirking grin and said, "come with me over to the van." He showed me inside and I just looked in the doorway, and saw a C64 on a small portable table, with various devices seemingly powered by a huge extension cord connected to a lawn-mower sounding gas-powered generator. "Like an idiot, I said, "I DECODED IT." (knowing that was a bald-faced lie.) Kurt nudged me and showed in his open palm, two ornate, ninja throwing stars... I took on the persona of Randy "Macho Man" Savage and said, "OHHH YEAH, BROTHER! CAN YA DIG IT?" Kurt quickly assumed a fighting stance, so I quickly jumped on the top rope, and dropped a flying elbow. Kurt shrugged it off and rolled over, unsheathing a katana, and taking it right against my neck, from a distance...almost drawing blood. He laughed and said, "You didn't really decode it, did you?"
Hah, as an InSoc fan from back in the day, I used this same model of 64 Modem and 64C with a boombox back in 1992 to decode this track. It was like using Little Orphan Annie's decoder ring except it was a way better message than "Drink your Ovaltine" :D
Each one of these hidden data tracks keeps topping the previous with its level of hackery needed to obtain the message/data! For the younger viewers, it was common in the mid-1990s to find audio CDs with "bonus content". You could insert the disc in a PC/Mac and have QuickTime or Flash content play; a music video or digitized lyrics were common.
Hah! I remember doing this with my Atari ST and a “smart-modem” using some super-sketchy spliced wires back in 1992. Tried it with an intro to a track from their previous album (“HACK”), but it was a 1200 Baud recording with other data streams overlaid. Guessing that everyone that tried it on “HACK” inspired them to put this track in P&L Inc.
8-Bit Show And Tell Don’t waste your time trying to mess with it. It sounds great, and is obviously culled from the middle of an XMODEM or YMODEM file transfer protocol, but there’s nothing recoverable. Just enjoy the music. To this day, it’s some of my favorite.
I had a somewhat similar setup, but for serious data use. Not any audio trickery. An old BBC Micro modem patched into my Amiga. The Amiga had no way to trigger the dialling process (or at least at my young age, I had no idea how to invoke it). The solution? A hard toggle switch on the modem to set on/off hook. But, yeah that had some interesting wiring to pull off as I vaguely recall. So I'd manually dial the number, wait for the tone, flick the switch and hang up the phone. It had a dial to manually set the speed/mode. 300org, 300 answer, 1200/75 org and 75/1200 answer. Those were the days. It wasn't long before I upgraded to 9600, then 14400 and so on as time went on.
r00ty's channel That’s great! At one point I had the innards of a cheap late-80’s handset phone gaffer-taped onto a set of 1970’s headphones, a Jerry-rigged boom mic (bare condenser element) wired via toggle-switch into a discarded industrial 2400 baud non-smart-modem so with a flip of a couple of toggle switches I could be talking to my buddies at 2am, dial out with the phone, and flip over to the modem. Good times!
@@ggonzale69 I actually had something like that given to me. I vaguely remember it stated it was 4800 bps and had an array of lights on it. I didn't even get it to power up, let alone work out how I was going to connect it up. Since 4800bps wasn't really a "standard" rate at the time I didn't see it as a likely success story. So it gathered dust on the shelf. My suspicion now, knowing more than I did then, was that it was most likely a decommissioned leased line modem. I mean it would have possibly worked if someone had a second one at the other end :)
Yes, every word is true! Victorinox did indeed issue a limited edition knife in 1979 that included a miniature arc welder. It was powered by a zero-point energy device, the secret to which was tragically lost to humanity in that famous fire that burned down not only the gambling house but also the adjacent Swiss patent office. This event is recorded in the song Smoke on the Water. Interestingly, the "pure energy" in Information Society's eponymous song is an homage to this device. Every word is this story is also true.
I love the classic telephone ! :D I also have a 80s phone. Large, looks kinda like the Commodore phone. I clicked this video fast ! Modems have always interested me. Regarding stop bits, I have wondered why they exist. One use for it I saw when building the Videopac/Odyssey II RAMCart where you can transfer a game to the console via serial terminal. At 9600 bps, 8N1 is used, but at 19200 8N2 is used. The reason for the extra bit is for the videopac's cpu to have extra time to save the received byte :) The MCU is MCS48 at about 0.5MHz. Great video. Loved it !
@@Okurka. Best he'd be getting is stories, because at 300baud, still images would take so long to transfer that it was more likely somebody else in the house would pick up one of the other phones and screw up the connection before even one finished transfer. :D
@@Okurka. hahaha that's funny. To tell the truth on my C64, that predates porn. I was interested in copy software, utilities, games and chatting in the Forums... when social media wasn't cool.
If you haven’t seen the Information Society episode of VH1’s Bands Reunited it’s fantastic! I don’t think Robb/Harland/Cassidy would be putting out music today if it wasn’t for that episode happening.
You know Kurt pulled this trick again on the next InSoc album - "Don't Be Afraid" has the same modem noise type deal on track 10 (I think it's even still 300bps N,8,1 which by 1997 was rather awkward) which led to an online scavenger hunt to collect the pieces of the actual 10th track which you could then reassemble into a .wav file for the song 'White Roses'. Unfortunately I have a european copy of the CD from then which just had the song on the disc, along with altered cover art (supposedly to assuage the German market that there was nothing 'Satanic' going on since the original cover art features a very Baphomet like creature) I think the sites that were hosting the scavenger hunt most likely are all gone by now, still an interesting and cool use of the net back then. Also loving the pronunciation of Recife and Curitiba ;)
Thank you so very much for that DRAMATIC reading at the end! I had no idea that sound could be sent to the modem using a method like this. So very strange.
I remember decoding this on my BBS computer back when this CD came out. Allowed the phone line to time out, then played the CD back with headphones rubber banded to the telephone. A simple ATA and there was the text. Way cool.
"Every word of this story is true ... " (all be it somewhat enhanced) Frequency Shift Keying: Most folks think that the signal is high voltage for a '1' and low voltage for a '0'. It's actually two distinct frequencies. The phone lines best carried audio tones around 300 to 3000 hz and so most data transmissions fell into these frequencies. The actual two tones were not as critical as long as the separation of the two was 200 hz. The reason each "bit" of data was 8 to 10 cycles long was a limitation of the electronics at the time. Modems were originally analog devices that depended on "notch" or "comb" filtering to distinguish frequency shifts, and each state (1 or 0) took a period of time to stabilize - measured in microseconds. The whole signal is technically a Frequency Modulated (FM) signal and decoded or demodulated very much the same way your radio takes a (lets say) 95.5 megahertz signal and turns it into audio frequencies. Because of the relatively narrow band width of (voice) audio phone lines the maximum baud rate was 2400 baud, but slower rates insured better signal integrity. Higher rates were achieved through signal phase shifting which causes side band interference frequencies, but that's a whole 'nother topic.
@@videodistro I never knew that - but I always suspected that baud != bps, because it didn't make sense to me to have these two different names for same thing...
@@videodistro Technically speaking, the baud rate refers to how many times per second the modem can shift from one frequency to the other. Each "bit" of a byte is equal to one of these frequency shifts and called a "transmission symbol" and it takes 8 of those to equal one Byte of data. In older machines where the entire character set was represented in an 8 bit byte , a 300 baud rate using a start bit and stop bit - a total of 10 bits per character, meant a wopping 30 characters per second. Watch the video and observe the rate that each line of text fills. A higher baud rate does mean a faster data rate, but if it's multiplexed out to several channels the data rate gets divided by the number of channels 2400 baud = 240 characters per second. If divided into 4 channels this means an average rate of 60 characters per second per channel (minus a little in switching time "overhead"). These early modems were not typically multiplexed.
@@robsku1 It does equate to the same thing but baud rate specifically refers to how many shifts between tones it can achieve per second. Because a single bit is represented by one frequency shift the baud rate equates to bit rate. The bit rate begins to differ from the baud rate with different encoding schemes such as using a parity bit or other error checking.
I own Information Society's debut CD as a first pressing CD+G which displays on my 64-bit Atari Jaguar CDROM. Tis nice! Ascap = ass cap Sao = sow rhymes with cow
I don't know if anyone else mentioned this (and I might have already myself) but MC Frontalot's "Zero Day" (released in 2010... gosh has it been 10 years already?!) has a hidden track with a C64 tape image on it. :)
Cool, I didn't know about that! I grabbed the track and was surprised it was silent, but on a hunch loaded it into Audacity, and amplified it 50dB, and sure enough there was something that sounded a lot like C64 tape data :)
I remember building a null modem cable back in '89 so that I could read sequential files on a 1541-encoded 5.25" floppy and send them from a Commodore 64 to my new XT clone running Procomm Plus, then stripping out the Bank Street Writer-specific formatting codes. Fun times.
Awesome! One of my all time favorite bands. I have owned this album since new and still never tried this. I think there are other data/modem tracks among their other albums. Don't be afraid comes to mind.
This brings back memories. I recall my friend's 300 baud modems. My first modem was a faster, more up to date, blazing fast 1200 baud. The Commodore 1670, which cost me $115 CDN. And worth every penny.
edgeeffect Draytek 2820v broadband router has two analogue phone portS - so you can connect two modems and dial each other. I’m using a raspberry pi to run a retro bbs software and an old olivetti m24 to dial into it.
Ah, thank you for this. :) I just found all of my CD's that had been pack up since college. Going through them now, backing them up and came across this InSoc album. I had solved this back in the day but I couldn't remember all that it said and, sadly, got rid of all my old hardware. Interesting note, they are actually still around and had an album come out last year (ODDfellows 2021).
My friend called me about the track and we talked about how to decode it... then I suggested, "just hit play, hold it up to the phone", I hit "ATA", my modem took the line and blam... we were really surprised it worked on the first try. We used to ATA/ATD eachother all the time and chat modem-to-modem, it was ridiculous, but we were kids and had our own phonelines. Although the text was a bit of a letdown :-)
This is amazing. I grew up with internet starting at 38.8kbps - this is a killer find. 56kbps internet was amazing (ironic how it was in line with the voltage of the phone line at ~56v). I used to play games against friends with direct connect terminal connections xD 'whats that?'-kids lol AT ATA KERMIT!
funny thing that we could play multiplayer games back then with dozens of people, but the limit on how many people can play simultaneously nowadays seem to be the same... gone are the days of optimization and actual engineering
Forbidden Forest..Awesome game..You're right about that! And Aztec Challenge! I find myself humming tune's from those games all the time! Embedded in my soul. And thank you for the great vids!
Did Commodore manufacture telephones? If so, now I *have* to get a Commodore rotary phone. I still have and use a rotary phone, but it's a Western Electric princess phone for Bell Systems from some time in the 50s or 60s. Yesterday while going through some old C64 floppies that I've never tried since I bought them I found a terminal program named "CBterm/C64" (it's "user supported software", or donationware from the early to mid 80s. Anyway, today I was thinking, what would I even use a program like that for? And I have several terminal programs. Are there any BBSs around anymore, or any other type of service that I could use a terminal program and my modem for? I used to use one program to access the aviation weather systems with modem connections but those have long since been shut down. What's around these days?
Commodore had this phone made for them by Northern Telecom (or whatever name they went by at the time) - it was a very common model here in Canada in the '70s and '80s, and they had it customized with the Commodore name and dial insert. There were a small number of BBSes that could still be dialed to last I checked, but there's a much larger number that are available over the Internet, but those require a "wi-fi modem" which is a new piece of hardware, but it's compatible with most old terminal programs. So, there isn't all that much to do with your old modem besides call the few remaining long-distance BBSes, or do experiments like this video shows :)
I worked for a telco back in the eighties... I fondly remember when you could look at data on a line, and actually read ASCII content in real time. None of this high speed encrypted stuff.... lol
This is a great video.. thank you. Brings back memories. We had no error correction in our terminal programs back then so if any errors happened it would mess up the entire download. I would wait till 10:30 PM when my dad would go to sleep before I could get on the modem/bbs's. Many times during a download I would see this garbage come across the screen and that was when my dad would pick up the phone and yell for me to get off. I would have to wait an hour or more before trying again.
Right! I used to get soooo pissed would never fail, almost done with the download and m9m would call her friend or work and have to start all over at a screaming 24kbps. That was fast back then lol....
I remember deciding this in college with a surplus acoustic coupler modem that I held a speaker to. I recently did it on a modern computer all in software. Are you interested in how that is done?
Unfortunately, while it's the same baud rate, the C64 tape protocol is quite different than the modem protocol; they're not compatible. Also, the C64 doesn't have an analog tape input like the Spectrum; it has a digital edge connector unique to the Commodore tape drive.
That is a cool rotary dial phone. Been looking in thrift shops for a rotary one. Found a mid 80's dtmf one which is cool though. Anyhow, great vid as always.
I seem to remember I set up the terminal emulator then called our own phone number and picked up and held the receiver next to the speaker, then played the track. I had to do it all pretty quickly but it worked and I think I still have that txt saved somewhere.
Hi Robin. I really like your videos. But I would also like to see more details about your game assembly programming that you did back in the day. I would appreciate that very much. I‘ve just learned the basic rules of assembly programming and currently I’m trying to write a small Krackout resp. Breakout game. It’s fun, but also pretty frustrating. When I write a new routine it almost never works for the first time.
I got this to work back in 93 I believe ... I issued an "ATH" and played the track on another phone on the same line ... the dial tone didnt effect the data too much ... a few garbled characters but mostly readable ... ( 2400 baud modem on a 386sx leading edge luggable )
Imagine putting this CD into a CD changer, falling asleep while listening the music at high volume in random mode, then the random generator selects this track :) . The hidden data track on an LP is better in that aspect, you don't have to listen to the data, because you have to put the stylus on the data track manually. AFAIK, hidden tracks cannot be done on CDs, unfortunatelly. They should've put this feature in the Red Book. A track, that can be selected only manually.
Not true, technically. There were some audio CD's out there that had music information before track 1. To access it, you'd have to hold reverse on the player and if it supported it, it would play the audio before 1, which would have been way cooler in this situation.
@@asdfasdfasdfasdeff Hey, thanks! I've never heard about it. And it's quite a long list of albums. Although I very much doubt this is featured in the Red Book. Otherwise every CD player should be able to play it. But it's really a cool easter egg hack capability. I wonder how long this 'track 0' can be. I remember my few 90 minute CD-Rs, which are also not Red Book compliant. My CD player had hard time reading the last track. It could do it only if you let it play through the previous track, or fast forward to it. If you tried to skip to the last track, the player went absolutely crazy, made weird clicking, screaming focus and tracking servo noises, then dropped the CD on the tray while it was still spinning, and started to play the next disc...
@@mrnmrn1 No idea, but if you look at that list there are some that have 20+ minute long "track 0's", meaning I guess you could make it as long as you wanted as long as you don't exceed the total amount of audio time stamped to the disc. I'm so old I remember my first CD player (Magnavox) had index buttons as well, as some CD's had "sub-tracks" called an index. One of my cd's, Aerosmith's "Pump" had indices.
I used to hang out on irc, and when I would encounter annoying people, they were almost invariably on dial up connections, so I would tell them that their modem was about to hang up. I had a script on my Linux machine which would send an icmp ping packet, with the payload including +++ATH0. I would whois them to get their ip, and then use that script against their ip. I was on an isdn connection (and before that I used to have to telnet into some other system, as my modem was affected..), and about 30 sec later I would see them time out in the irc channel. I can only imagine their reactions.
Or dig through the CD+G "sampler" disc that came with the Sega CD where one of the members of Information Society listed his favorite chili recipe at the end of their song. It called for cooking the meat in bacon grease IIRC...
That sounds like DTMF, ringing tone, a short clip of (i guess) 1200bps PSK and then just random samples of bus noise. Like the bus noise you could hear for example in the output of early SoundBlaster cards, picked up by the cheap unshielded amp circuit. Or like in the end of Techmoan's outro.
If I believed in god I'd say you are doing the lord's work, sir. This kind of thing deserves to be preserved for the ages. Future generations will thank you for this.
isn't it written as "8N1" instead of "N81"? because you start with 8 data bits, then comes the parity (or in this case it doesn't) and then 1 stop bit. so the order N81 seems off. or did they have the parity bit before the data bits back then? strange...
Yes, normally it's 8N1, and in fact I had even titled this video (and made the thumbnail!) with 8,N,1 and then looked at the CD again and saw they had used N,8,1. I like to think that they did it on purpose (or even accidentally) due to the famous C64 incantation LOAD"*",8,1 - I wish I had noticed that while I was recording the video as I would have mentioned it :)
Back on the day a ham operator would have only had to run the audio into his gear similarly to the way he connected his radio to his C64 to communicate digitally over the air. As long as his software could handle 300 bps (the most common speed was 1200 baud) it would be a piece of cake to decode it.
I wish! I think it was 8-Bit Guy who said Joshua wasn't a real speech synthesis, unfortunately; it was a human voice modified to sound more artificial. Great sound though.
300 baud those where the days, I remember be outed on some BBS sites because I couldn't go faster 1200 bps modems were like 1541 disk drives where just out of reach. But if i would have had that power in the day it would have just allowed me to get into trouble much faster. I tell my kids about it and they don't see the significance of it all they missed DSL and went into cable speeds. typing back and forth to your friends had a special meaning today we do it with mobile phones, where in my day it took a room with a computer a phone line and some ingenuity to get it all to work.
That style of rotary phone was common in Canada -- my parents still have some units in black! I believe they were made by "Northern Telecom" (better known as Nortel and Nortel Networks in the late 90s onwards). It looks like Commodore bought a bunch of units and printed their logo on it.
I'm at an early point in the video and already I'm wondering whether handshaking will be a problem, given its one-way transmit. Unless they've built-in mock challenge/answer tones
I tried to decode this using a program called minimodem (which is basically a software modem) and couldn't get it to work for some reason. Tried it direct, then also imported it into audacity and amplified it so it peaked at 0dB, still didn't work. Not sure why, the program even has options for reading directly from a file. I wonder if maybe it needs to be inverted or if the frequencies are set wrong... but it has a Bell 103 mode.
Are you starting with an mp3 that's been ripped from the CD? I'd definitely try making it mono, and if that's not enough, invert it. Probably best to have it peak at -3 to -6 dB, don't have it go all the way to 0.
Pretty cool Robin. If I had this CD, is there anyway I could do this using VICE or another C64 emulator, either by hooking up a boom box to my computer's line in, just putting the CD in my Optical drive or downloading the MP3?
I'm not sure if any of the emulators allow audio to be input into their modem emulators. It'd be cool if it worked, but I didn't find anything by googling a bit now, and I've never heard of anyone getting that to work. VICE does emulate modems, but I think it's just at the data level, not at the audio/phone line level.
@@m7hacke it doesn't have to be a C64. Any terminal program should be able to do it. You could possibly do it on a Linux machine by piping vlc or some other audio playback into the serial port device, and use screen or minicom or something, but I am just theorising.
Hi DJ! Do you remember how you hooked it up to your modem back in '92? It's been interesting hearing from other people in the comments how they managed it. P.S. It was great hanging out with you at VCFMW, I hope you can make it back again!
@@8_Bit Likewise! Wouldn't miss it if I can help it. It probably comes as no surprise to you that I had an acoustic coupler when this album came out. I just put it near the speaker and that's all it took.
Hi Robin. Would not it have been possible to convert the sound file directly to the PC as a T64 file and then transfer via memory card to the SD2IEC to the C64?
I'm not aware of any program that would convert the audio from a modem into a T64 file but even if it existed, I think this is more fun to do it the way the creators envisioned it.
@@8_Bit Yes I can understand that. I just thought of the people who have no hardware. Furthermore, I thought that a T64 file just contains these sounds. Unfortunately, I do not know the format of a T64 file. Was just such a thought ....
@@frankb763 T64 files don't contain audio; perhaps you're thinking of .TAP files which don't really contain audio either, but are closer to a .wav in that they describe the time between the pulses in the audio. .wav and .tap formats can be converted back and forth (with some loss of information, but ideally no loss of actual data). But this particular audio we're talking about isn't in Commodore datasette format, it's from a modem which while using similar principles, isn't compatible.
OMG, Brazil does it once again... I don't even know what to say... Just put my head down, face palm and utter noises out of sheer embarassment mixed with PTSD nightmare flashbacks... Absolutely terrifying to realize that this story from 30 years ago pretty much describes how it still is to live in the tropical crap hole. Maybe now you guys can understand why people flee. There's no such thing as "fixing" this place from the inside out, you see... It is turning into China 2.0
The Stranglers' 1984 Aural Sculpture album had a Sinclair ZX Spectrum text adventure as the last track on the cassette that I had. I had a Spectrum but wasn't into text adventures and I knew it wouldn't be terribly complex so I didn't play it despite playing the rest of the tape all the time. There's always TH-cam to let me know what I missed out on! th-cam.com/video/Ret0b8-ZGmo/w-d-xo.html
1:39 I thought that was a Sony and I was thinking "How is that still working?!" (My first CD boombox was a Sony and the CD player died after about six months)
JPPBM actually owns the rights to make new carts, and you can buy them in person from him at World of Commodore in Toronto in December and Vintage Computer Festival Midwest in Chicago in September, but for whatever reason he doesn't seem to sell them online.
I can’t listen to the audio because I’m at work but I’m too impatient to wait to ask. Why was the modem required. Couldn’t this have been recorded to tape and loaded using the tape drive?
Back when the record came out, we decoded it too. I had a BBS running so I had two phone lines. One friend called the BBS number and held the telephone handset up to the speaker, we ran a simple terminal on the BBS machine and sent an ATA to it's modem. Boom, the text came across and we marveled at the cleverness of it.
I had a BBS too for years.... what was yours? ;)
I miss that era! I was co-sysop on 2 boards. One of our friends ran a C=64 board, when I was one of the last Commodore holdouts, but transitioning to PC. What a magical time!
Heck yea, late to the party but I ran Renegade and Oblivion/2 and blabla (pirate BBS) I was elated to get arrow keys working for ANSI menus and door games and whatnot, all self taught and hand ground. I decoded "most" of this at my friends house who had a big ass stereo and a PC like mine, I think 386/486 at the time, I said shhhh stfu we can't make any noise while this is going. There was some garble in the transmission but we shit ourselves when text started appearing on the screen after an ATA / ATD command and let it fly.
Oh this video here takes me back! It was in '93, if I recall. I had just got a Commodore 64 with money from a work bonus. I also had this CD and always wondered how I could have fed that data track into the damn thing.
I actually went to an Information Society concert and after waiting for seemingly hours to leave once it ended, i somehow accidentally ran into Kurt! I was literally shocked, and I wanted to say something, but couldn't, because I knew it would be something corny and embarrassing. But in some nervous outburst, I said, "COMMODORE 64!"
He looked at me in an unfamiliar way, and I said, "THE TRACK! THE DATA TRACK!" and I held out the CD jewel case that I had brought, hoping I could get him to sign. He realized this and reached for it.
"I WANT TO DECODE THE TRACK!"
He perked up and gave me a smirking grin and said, "come with me over to the van."
He showed me inside and I just looked in the doorway, and saw a C64 on a small portable table, with various devices seemingly powered by a huge extension cord connected to a lawn-mower sounding gas-powered generator.
"Like an idiot, I said, "I DECODED IT." (knowing that was a bald-faced lie.)
Kurt nudged me and showed in his open palm, two ornate, ninja throwing stars...
I took on the persona of Randy "Macho Man" Savage and said, "OHHH YEAH, BROTHER! CAN YA DIG IT?"
Kurt quickly assumed a fighting stance, so I quickly jumped on the top rope, and dropped a flying elbow. Kurt shrugged it off and rolled over, unsheathing a katana, and taking it right against my neck, from a distance...almost drawing blood. He laughed and said, "You didn't really decode it, did you?"
Hah, as an InSoc fan from back in the day, I used this same model of 64 Modem and 64C with a boombox back in 1992 to decode this track. It was like using Little Orphan Annie's decoder ring except it was a way better message than "Drink your Ovaltine" :D
Best reply I have seen to anything on the internet ever...............
Nice Douglas Adams / HHGTTG reference.
4:44 - I suggest you refuse any job offers that involve getting on the ''B' Ark'
@@Fanny-Fanny I'd refuse the A Ark job offer too, medical seems funky..
Each one of these hidden data tracks keeps topping the previous with its level of hackery needed to obtain the message/data! For the younger viewers, it was common in the mid-1990s to find audio CDs with "bonus content". You could insert the disc in a PC/Mac and have QuickTime or Flash content play; a music video or digitized lyrics were common.
"It's worked so far, but we're not out yet."
Great work as always! I particularly liked the HHGTTG quote, it was so good to hear one that was a little more obscure like that.
Yay, we're descended from Ship B. Oh, wait. Those were the ones that were a "bunch of useless idiots."
Hah! I remember doing this with my Atari ST and a “smart-modem” using some super-sketchy spliced wires back in 1992. Tried it with an intro to a track from their previous album (“HACK”), but it was a 1200 Baud recording with other data streams overlaid. Guessing that everyone that tried it on “HACK” inspired them to put this track in P&L Inc.
Cool, I'm expecting a copy of Hack in the mail soon and I'll see if I can get anywhere with it.
8-Bit Show And Tell Don’t waste your time trying to mess with it. It sounds great, and is obviously culled from the middle of an XMODEM or YMODEM file transfer protocol, but there’s nothing recoverable. Just enjoy the music. To this day, it’s some of my favorite.
I had a somewhat similar setup, but for serious data use. Not any audio trickery. An old BBC Micro modem patched into my Amiga. The Amiga had no way to trigger the dialling process (or at least at my young age, I had no idea how to invoke it). The solution? A hard toggle switch on the modem to set on/off hook. But, yeah that had some interesting wiring to pull off as I vaguely recall.
So I'd manually dial the number, wait for the tone, flick the switch and hang up the phone. It had a dial to manually set the speed/mode. 300org, 300 answer, 1200/75 org and 75/1200 answer. Those were the days.
It wasn't long before I upgraded to 9600, then 14400 and so on as time went on.
r00ty's channel That’s great! At one point I had the innards of a cheap late-80’s handset phone gaffer-taped onto a set of 1970’s headphones, a Jerry-rigged boom mic (bare condenser element) wired via toggle-switch into a discarded industrial 2400 baud non-smart-modem so with a flip of a couple of toggle switches I could be talking to my buddies at 2am, dial out with the phone, and flip over to the modem.
Good times!
@@ggonzale69 I actually had something like that given to me. I vaguely remember it stated it was 4800 bps and had an array of lights on it. I didn't even get it to power up, let alone work out how I was going to connect it up. Since 4800bps wasn't really a "standard" rate at the time I didn't see it as a likely success story. So it gathered dust on the shelf.
My suspicion now, knowing more than I did then, was that it was most likely a decommissioned leased line modem. I mean it would have possibly worked if someone had a second one at the other end :)
Yes, every word is true! Victorinox did indeed issue a limited edition knife in 1979 that included a miniature arc welder. It was powered by a zero-point energy device, the secret to which was tragically lost to humanity in that famous fire that burned down not only the gambling house but also the adjacent Swiss patent office. This event is recorded in the song Smoke on the Water.
Interestingly, the "pure energy" in Information Society's eponymous song is an homage to this device.
Every word is this story is also true.
I love the classic telephone ! :D I also have a 80s phone. Large, looks kinda like the Commodore phone. I clicked this video fast ! Modems have always interested me. Regarding stop bits, I have wondered why they exist. One use for it I saw when building the Videopac/Odyssey II RAMCart where you can transfer a game to the console via serial terminal. At 9600 bps, 8N1 is used, but at 19200 8N2 is used. The reason for the extra bit is for the videopac's cpu to have extra time to save the received byte :) The MCU is MCS48 at about 0.5MHz. Great video. Loved it !
I loved that story! Well worth the effort you put into decoding - thanks for sharing it 😊👍
Back in the 80's I had a C64 and 300 Baud Modem. What a cool time in my life. No one knew what I was doing and why, but I did.
Your parents knew that you were downloading pr0n.
@@Okurka. Best he'd be getting is stories, because at 300baud, still images would take so long to transfer that it was more likely somebody else in the house would pick up one of the other phones and screw up the connection before even one finished transfer. :D
@@Okurka. hahaha that's funny. To tell the truth on my C64, that predates porn. I was interested in copy software, utilities, games and chatting in the Forums... when social media wasn't cool.
@@drdysl3xia795 C64 predates pr0n?
girls.c64.org
@@Okurka. I was about to suggest that site too.
If you haven’t seen the Information Society episode of VH1’s Bands Reunited it’s fantastic! I don’t think Robb/Harland/Cassidy would be putting out music today if it wasn’t for that episode happening.
That was very interesting and entertaining to watch, thanks for the suggestion. But... Kurt never showed up! How did they get him back?
Oh, I found this! web.archive.org/web/20071230112756/insoc.org/texts/BandReunion.HTML
@@8_Bit god bless the web archive... javascript is a devil's doing straight from hell...
Kurt used to hang out on EFNet IRC back in the 90s. Interesting dude.
You know Kurt pulled this trick again on the next InSoc album - "Don't Be Afraid" has the same modem noise type deal on track 10 (I think it's even still 300bps N,8,1 which by 1997 was rather awkward) which led to an online scavenger hunt to collect the pieces of the actual 10th track which you could then reassemble into a .wav file for the song 'White Roses'. Unfortunately I have a european copy of the CD from then which just had the song on the disc, along with altered cover art (supposedly to assuage the German market that there was nothing 'Satanic' going on since the original cover art features a very Baphomet like creature) I think the sites that were hosting the scavenger hunt most likely are all gone by now, still an interesting and cool use of the net back then. Also loving the pronunciation of Recife and Curitiba ;)
Oh man, blast from the past. I had that same stereo forever. Happy new year and keep up the great work!
Thank you so very much for that DRAMATIC reading at the end! I had no idea that sound could be sent to the modem using a method like this. So very strange.
I remember decoding this on my BBS computer back when this CD came out. Allowed the phone line to time out, then played the CD back with headphones rubber banded to the telephone. A simple ATA and there was the text. Way cool.
Lol, @2:10 when the data bursts happen BOTH my cats perked up like someone was talking to them!
Petition to rename SYN ACK to SYN CAT?
"Every word of this story is true ... " (all be it somewhat enhanced)
Frequency Shift Keying: Most folks think that the signal is high voltage for a '1' and low voltage for a '0'. It's actually two distinct frequencies. The phone lines best carried audio tones around 300 to 3000 hz and so most data transmissions fell into these frequencies. The actual two tones were not as critical as long as the separation of the two was 200 hz. The reason each "bit" of data was 8 to 10 cycles long was a limitation of the electronics at the time. Modems were originally analog devices that depended on "notch" or "comb" filtering to distinguish frequency shifts, and each state (1 or 0) took a period of time to stabilize - measured in microseconds. The whole signal is technically a Frequency Modulated (FM) signal and decoded or demodulated very much the same way your radio takes a (lets say) 95.5 megahertz signal and turns it into audio frequencies. Because of the relatively narrow band width of (voice) audio phone lines the maximum baud rate was 2400 baud, but slower rates insured better signal integrity. Higher rates were achieved through signal phase shifting which causes side band interference frequencies, but that's a whole 'nother topic.
2400 bits per second was not 2400 baud. It's still 300 baud, which is 300 bps per channel of frequencies. Baud for NOT equal pits per second. Sigh.
@@videodistro I never knew that - but I always suspected that baud != bps, because it didn't make sense to me to have these two different names for same thing...
@@videodistro Technically speaking, the baud rate refers to how many times per second the modem can shift from one frequency to the other. Each "bit" of a byte is equal to one of these frequency shifts and called a "transmission symbol" and it takes 8 of those to equal one Byte of data. In older machines where the entire character set was represented in an 8 bit byte , a 300 baud rate using a start bit and stop bit - a total of 10 bits per character, meant a wopping 30 characters per second. Watch the video and observe the rate that each line of text fills. A higher baud rate does mean a faster data rate, but if it's multiplexed out to several channels the data rate gets divided by the number of channels 2400 baud = 240 characters per second. If divided into 4 channels this means an average rate of 60 characters per second per channel (minus a little in switching time "overhead"). These early modems were not typically multiplexed.
@@robsku1 It does equate to the same thing but baud rate specifically refers to how many shifts between tones it can achieve per second. Because a single bit is represented by one frequency shift the baud rate equates to bit rate. The bit rate begins to differ from the baud rate with different encoding schemes such as using a parity bit or other error checking.
@@3DPDK In audacity if you did a frequency analysis of this signal, would you see two frequency spikes ?
Predating the Enhanced CD standard by about three years. :o
I own Information Society's debut CD as a first pressing CD+G which displays on my 64-bit Atari Jaguar CDROM. Tis nice!
Ascap = ass cap
Sao = sow rhymes with cow
Loved the Douglas Adams reference to Telephone Sanitizers. I'm on the B Ark too
I don't know if anyone else mentioned this (and I might have already myself) but MC Frontalot's "Zero Day" (released in 2010... gosh has it been 10 years already?!) has a hidden track with a C64 tape image on it. :)
Cool, I didn't know about that! I grabbed the track and was surprised it was silent, but on a hunch loaded it into Audacity, and amplified it 50dB, and sure enough there was something that sounded a lot like C64 tape data :)
4:20 wow I love that phone. Very cool.
Man, I miss BBSes! Cool video!
I remember building a null modem cable back in '89 so that I could read sequential files on a 1541-encoded 5.25" floppy and send them from a Commodore 64 to my new XT clone running Procomm Plus, then stripping out the Bank Street Writer-specific formatting codes. Fun times.
"I mean, I think that's fun" - made my day.
Awesome! One of my all time favorite bands. I have owned this album since new and still never tried this. I think there are other data/modem tracks among their other albums. Don't be afraid comes to mind.
This brings back memories. I recall my friend's 300 baud modems. My first modem was a faster, more up to date, blazing fast 1200 baud. The Commodore 1670, which cost me $115 CDN. And worth every penny.
Stuff like this is why I still love working amateur radio digital modes :) There are a lot of similarities.
I'm playing around with modems NOT connected to phone lines at the moment... so this video is timely!
edgeeffect Draytek 2820v broadband router has two analogue phone portS - so you can connect two modems and dial each other. I’m using a raspberry pi to run a retro bbs software and an old olivetti m24 to dial into it.
Ah, thank you for this. :) I just found all of my CD's that had been pack up since college. Going through them now, backing them up and came across this InSoc album. I had solved this back in the day but I couldn't remember all that it said and, sadly, got rid of all my old hardware. Interesting note, they are actually still around and had an album come out last year (ODDfellows 2021).
I did this using a 300bps acoustic coupler modem back in the 90's, worked fine just putting headphones up against the coupler
Thanks for making this very entertaining! Hope to see more
This is so fascinating! I love easter eggs like this!
My friend called me about the track and we talked about how to decode it... then I suggested, "just hit play, hold it up to the phone", I hit "ATA", my modem took the line and blam... we were really surprised it worked on the first try. We used to ATA/ATD eachother all the time and chat modem-to-modem, it was ridiculous, but we were kids and had our own phonelines. Although the text was a bit of a letdown :-)
This is amazing. I grew up with internet starting at 38.8kbps - this is a killer find. 56kbps internet was amazing (ironic how it was in line with the voltage of the phone line at ~56v). I used to play games against friends with direct connect terminal connections xD 'whats that?'-kids lol AT ATA KERMIT!
funny thing that we could play multiplayer games back then with dozens of people, but the limit on how many people can play simultaneously nowadays seem to be the same... gone are the days of optimization and actual engineering
Great video! Very well explained and excellent demonstration of analog to digital communications.
Wow!! The information about Faith No More is awesome!
I've got that album, love INSOC. Hackers of the world unite!
Forbidden Forest..Awesome game..You're right about that! And Aztec Challenge!
I find myself humming tune's from those games all the time! Embedded in my soul.
And thank you for the great vids!
You know... I think I have one of those radioshack recorder boxes you showed. I'm gonna have to look through my stash of stuff to find it.
Did Commodore manufacture telephones? If so, now I *have* to get a Commodore rotary phone. I still have and use a rotary phone, but it's a Western Electric princess phone for Bell Systems from some time in the 50s or 60s.
Yesterday while going through some old C64 floppies that I've never tried since I bought them I found a terminal program named "CBterm/C64" (it's "user supported software", or donationware from the early to mid 80s. Anyway, today I was thinking, what would I even use a program like that for? And I have several terminal programs. Are there any BBSs around anymore, or any other type of service that I could use a terminal program and my modem for? I used to use one program to access the aviation weather systems with modem connections but those have long since been shut down. What's around these days?
Commodore had this phone made for them by Northern Telecom (or whatever name they went by at the time) - it was a very common model here in Canada in the '70s and '80s, and they had it customized with the Commodore name and dial insert.
There were a small number of BBSes that could still be dialed to last I checked, but there's a much larger number that are available over the Internet, but those require a "wi-fi modem" which is a new piece of hardware, but it's compatible with most old terminal programs. So, there isn't all that much to do with your old modem besides call the few remaining long-distance BBSes, or do experiments like this video shows :)
I worked for a telco back in the eighties... I fondly remember when you could look at data on a line, and actually read ASCII content in real time. None of this high speed encrypted stuff.... lol
This is a great video.. thank you. Brings back memories. We had no error correction in our terminal programs back then so if any errors happened it would mess up the entire download. I would wait till 10:30 PM when my dad would go to sleep before I could get on the modem/bbs's. Many times during a download I would see this garbage come across the screen and that was when my dad would pick up the phone and yell for me to get off. I would have to wait an hour or more before trying again.
Right! I used to get soooo pissed would never fail, almost done with the download and m9m would call her friend or work and have to start all over at a screaming 24kbps. That was fast back then lol....
I love almost everything about this, thank you
I remember deciding this in college with a surplus acoustic coupler modem that I held a speaker to. I recently did it on a modern computer all in software. Are you interested in how that is done?
The Commodore rotary telephone in Canada is pretty rare. Great piece of history. Hard to find, even on eBay! $$$
Greetings from Curitiba, Brazil... haha
Lovely way to put in a little hidden message if you ask me. Very cool!
How about the tape input? The Kansas city standard was 300 baud. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum also did 1200 &. 2400 on tape.
Unfortunately, while it's the same baud rate, the C64 tape protocol is quite different than the modem protocol; they're not compatible. Also, the C64 doesn't have an analog tape input like the Spectrum; it has a digital edge connector unique to the Commodore tape drive.
That is a cool rotary dial phone. Been looking in thrift shops for a rotary one. Found a mid 80's dtmf one which is cool though. Anyhow, great vid as always.
I seem to remember I set up the terminal emulator then called our own phone number and picked up and held the receiver next to the speaker, then played the track. I had to do it all pretty quickly but it worked and I think I still have that txt saved somewhere.
Hi Robin. I really like your videos. But I would also like to see more details about your game assembly programming that you did back in the day. I would appreciate that very much. I‘ve just learned the basic rules of assembly programming and currently I’m trying to write a small Krackout resp. Breakout game. It’s fun, but also pretty frustrating. When I write a new routine it almost never works for the first time.
I got this to work back in 93 I believe ... I issued an "ATH" and played the track on another phone on the same line ... the dial tone didnt effect the data too much ... a few garbled characters but mostly readable ... ( 2400 baud modem on a 386sx leading edge luggable )
Imagine putting this CD into a CD changer, falling asleep while listening the music at high volume in random mode, then the random generator selects this track :) . The hidden data track on an LP is better in that aspect, you don't have to listen to the data, because you have to put the stylus on the data track manually. AFAIK, hidden tracks cannot be done on CDs, unfortunatelly. They should've put this feature in the Red Book. A track, that can be selected only manually.
Not true, technically. There were some audio CD's out there that had music information before track 1. To access it, you'd have to hold reverse on the player and if it supported it, it would play the audio before 1, which would have been way cooler in this situation.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_albums_with_tracks_hidden_in_the_pregap
@@asdfasdfasdfasdeff Hey, thanks! I've never heard about it. And it's quite a long list of albums. Although I very much doubt this is featured in the Red Book. Otherwise every CD player should be able to play it. But it's really a cool easter egg hack capability. I wonder how long this 'track 0' can be.
I remember my few 90 minute CD-Rs, which are also not Red Book compliant. My CD player had hard time reading the last track. It could do it only if you let it play through the previous track, or fast forward to it. If you tried to skip to the last track, the player went absolutely crazy, made weird clicking, screaming focus and tracking servo noises, then dropped the CD on the tray while it was still spinning, and started to play the next disc...
@@mrnmrn1 No idea, but if you look at that list there are some that have 20+ minute long "track 0's", meaning I guess you could make it as long as you wanted as long as you don't exceed the total amount of audio time stamped to the disc.
I'm so old I remember my first CD player (Magnavox) had index buttons as well, as some CD's had "sub-tracks" called an index. One of my cd's, Aerosmith's "Pump" had indices.
Pete Davey I remember those. It’s a shame it never really caught on.
Very nice video and fantastic hardware! Thank for doing this one, it is very entertaining :)
Thank you for the headphone warning!!!
My favorite way to troll fellow modemers was to trick them into typing +++ 😂 🤣😂 🤣😂 🤣😂 🤣😂 🤣
I used to hang out on irc, and when I would encounter annoying people, they were almost invariably on dial up connections, so I would tell them that their modem was about to hang up. I had a script on my Linux machine which would send an icmp ping packet, with the payload including +++ATH0. I would whois them to get their ip, and then use that script against their ip. I was on an isdn connection (and before that I used to have to telnet into some other system, as my modem was affected..), and about 30 sec later I would see them time out in the irc channel. I can only imagine their reactions.
I still have one of those Commodore phones. Got it with my Commodore 1600 VicModem.
Dancing in happiness to Forbidden Forest kill-shot song.
Willing to take a crack at the audio on "Hard Currency" on their album "Hack"?
I used my phone to "listen" to the dialtone but I can't recall what the number it called was. I think, at the time, it was a long-distance residence.
Or dig through the CD+G "sampler" disc that came with the Sega CD where one of the members of Information Society listed his favorite chili recipe at the end of their song. It called for cooking the meat in bacon grease IIRC...
I'll take a look at both, thanks!
That sounds like DTMF, ringing tone, a short clip of (i guess) 1200bps PSK and then just random samples of bus noise. Like the bus noise you could hear for example in the output of early SoundBlaster cards, picked up by the cheap unshielded amp circuit. Or like in the end of Techmoan's outro.
Oooh! Oooh! Mister Kotter! Mister Kotter! I used to run a dial-up BBS! I know what 300BPS,N,8,1 means!
If I believed in god I'd say you are doing the lord's work, sir. This kind of thing deserves to be preserved for the ages. Future generations will thank you for this.
A 36 year old threat to burn the rain forest down for the cows was fulfilled. I guess they ran out of Marlboros, finally?
Chris Toast they did it for soy crops though. Not cows.
isn't it written as "8N1" instead of "N81"? because you start with 8 data bits, then comes the parity (or in this case it doesn't) and then 1 stop bit. so the order N81 seems off. or did they have the parity bit before the data bits back then? strange...
Yes, normally it's 8N1, and in fact I had even titled this video (and made the thumbnail!) with 8,N,1 and then looked at the CD again and saw they had used N,8,1. I like to think that they did it on purpose (or even accidentally) due to the famous C64 incantation LOAD"*",8,1 - I wish I had noticed that while I was recording the video as I would have mentioned it :)
In 2020 when cd-roms aare basically now a forgotten format for storing data, this seems even more ridiculous today.
Very interesting. Another thing thats my C64 (or C128 or Amiga) can do TODAY. Thanks man!
The local security force "Gang Mexicana" .... 🤣🤣🤣
Back on the day a ham operator would have only had to run the audio into his gear similarly to the way he connected his radio to his C64 to communicate digitally over the air. As long as his software could handle 300 bps (the most common speed was 1200 baud) it would be a piece of cake to decode it.
My best friend and I decoded this track by using Telix and using the off hook phone with a Tandy 1000 TX and a 1200 baud modem.
My brother and I decided this song back in 1995. It was awesome
You should have got Joshua to read it out.
I wish! I think it was 8-Bit Guy who said Joshua wasn't a real speech synthesis, unfortunately; it was a human voice modified to sound more artificial. Great sound though.
300 baud those where the days, I remember be outed on some BBS sites because I couldn't go faster 1200 bps modems were like 1541 disk drives where just out of reach. But if i would have had that power in the day it would have just allowed me to get into trouble much faster. I tell my kids about it and they don't see the significance of it all they missed DSL and went into cable speeds. typing back and forth to your friends had a special meaning today we do it with mobile phones, where in my day it took a room with a computer a phone line and some ingenuity to get it all to work.
+1 for the “B” Ark reference.
That style of rotary phone was common in Canada -- my parents still have some units in black! I believe they were made by "Northern Telecom" (better known as Nortel and Nortel Networks in the late 90s onwards). It looks like Commodore bought a bunch of units and printed their logo on it.
And "Northern Electric" before that. My uncle used to work for them.
OMG! That sounds like my first modem!!!
Just had a moment of reflection 1st used 300baud V21 dial modem in 1982 connecting to BBS
I had the same boombox, it gave me only 6 months of music because the laser went bad. I'm surprised to see that yours still works.
I'm at an early point in the video and already I'm wondering whether handshaking will be a problem, given its one-way transmit. Unless they've built-in mock challenge/answer tones
What a fun story, I couldn't stop smiling.
Some times it's sad being Brazilian
What's really sad is I was in a Menard's home center a few weeks ago and InfoSoc was playing on the PA :)
I tried to decode this using a program called minimodem (which is basically a software modem) and couldn't get it to work for some reason. Tried it direct, then also imported it into audacity and amplified it so it peaked at 0dB, still didn't work. Not sure why, the program even has options for reading directly from a file. I wonder if maybe it needs to be inverted or if the frequencies are set wrong... but it has a Bell 103 mode.
Are you starting with an mp3 that's been ripped from the CD? I'd definitely try making it mono, and if that's not enough, invert it. Probably best to have it peak at -3 to -6 dB, don't have it go all the way to 0.
Pretty cool Robin. If I had this CD, is there anyway I could do this using VICE or another C64 emulator, either by hooking up a boom box to my computer's line in, just putting the CD in my Optical drive or downloading the MP3?
I'm not sure if any of the emulators allow audio to be input into their modem emulators. It'd be cool if it worked, but I didn't find anything by googling a bit now, and I've never heard of anyone getting that to work. VICE does emulate modems, but I think it's just at the data level, not at the audio/phone line level.
@@8_Bit Thanks for the reply, Robin. I'll try to fool around with VICE when I am over my cold. I'll let you know if I get anywhere.
I couldn't find any modem emulation in VICE. Oh well. No big deal.
@@m7hacke it doesn't have to be a C64. Any terminal program should be able to do it.
You could possibly do it on a Linux machine by piping vlc or some other audio playback into the serial port device, and use screen or minicom or something, but I am just theorising.
@@SimonQuigley Thank you. Intetesting. What do you think about running a DOS terminal program in DOSbox or on a DOS PC?
Haven't read that since I first decoded it after the album came out.
Hi DJ! Do you remember how you hooked it up to your modem back in '92? It's been interesting hearing from other people in the comments how they managed it. P.S. It was great hanging out with you at VCFMW, I hope you can make it back again!
@@8_Bit Likewise! Wouldn't miss it if I can help it. It probably comes as no surprise to you that I had an acoustic coupler when this album came out. I just put it near the speaker and that's all it took.
Hi Robin. Would not it have been possible to convert the sound file directly to the PC as a T64 file and then transfer via memory card to the SD2IEC to the C64?
I'm not aware of any program that would convert the audio from a modem into a T64 file but even if it existed, I think this is more fun to do it the way the creators envisioned it.
@@8_Bit
Yes I can understand that. I just thought of the people who have no hardware. Furthermore, I thought that a T64 file just contains these sounds. Unfortunately, I do not know the format of a T64 file. Was just such a thought ....
@@frankb763 T64 files don't contain audio; perhaps you're thinking of .TAP files which don't really contain audio either, but are closer to a .wav in that they describe the time between the pulses in the audio. .wav and .tap formats can be converted back and forth (with some loss of information, but ideally no loss of actual data). But this particular audio we're talking about isn't in Commodore datasette format, it's from a modem which while using similar principles, isn't compatible.
@@8_Bit Yes, Thx. Have a Nice Day ---- Frank
It sounds like some amateur radio digital mode that escapes me at the moment. Maybe PSK31?
I wonder how they intended it to be played. Through an accoustic modem maybe?
OMG, Brazil does it once again... I don't even know what to say... Just put my head down, face palm and utter noises out of sheer embarassment mixed with PTSD nightmare flashbacks... Absolutely terrifying to realize that this story from 30 years ago pretty much describes how it still is to live in the tropical crap hole. Maybe now you guys can understand why people flee. There's no such thing as "fixing" this place from the inside out, you see... It is turning into China 2.0
This is cooler than cool man.
Dude, that freaked out my cat!
Good thing I didn't play it at full volume! It's very loud if you have it set at the same volume as the rest of the album (like, the music part!). :)
The Stranglers' 1984 Aural Sculpture album had a Sinclair ZX Spectrum text adventure as the last track on the cassette that I had. I had a Spectrum but wasn't into text adventures and I knew it wouldn't be terribly complex so I didn't play it despite playing the rest of the tape all the time. There's always TH-cam to let me know what I missed out on! th-cam.com/video/Ret0b8-ZGmo/w-d-xo.html
If you wanted to mess with people you'd set up a BBS with 300bps,7,E,2.
You monster. :-)
1:39 I thought that was a Sony and I was thinking "How is that still working?!" (My first CD boombox was a Sony and the CD player died after about six months)
Any idea where you can get a super snapshot cartridge v5 or later?
JPPBM actually owns the rights to make new carts, and you can buy them in person from him at World of Commodore in Toronto in December and Vintage Computer Festival Midwest in Chicago in September, but for whatever reason he doesn't seem to sell them online.
@@8_Bit I live in the UK, and I'm not planning to visit Canada anytime soon.
This is just awesome!!!
I can’t listen to the audio because I’m at work but I’m too impatient to wait to ask. Why was the modem required. Couldn’t this have been recorded to tape and loaded using the tape drive?
No. While both encoding schemes use audio tones, they're completely incompatible.
Where can I get a Swiss Army Knife arc-welder?