Loading PC Games from Reel to Reel Tape
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 มี.ค. 2021
- Let's encode some PC data on tape using the Kansas City Standard! Dozens of retro computers used audio cassette tapes as their method of loading and saving software, but using reel to reel tape? Now that’s more exciting -- and complete overkill with 10.5" reels at 15 inches per second.
● LGR links:
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
● Here's a link to the KCS 0.8 software I used:
archive.org/details/kcs08
● Music courtesy of:
www.epidemicsound.com
#LGR #Retro #Technology - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Interesting fact about recording data on audio: In Poland in the 1980s, a scout radio broadcast a program with recordings of full games for Commodore64. It was enough to record these noises on an audio cassette. Like first torrent (times before the existence of the Copyright Act).
That's actually so cool !
In the UK the BBC used to have a TV show about computers on in the 1980s. At the end of the show they would always broadcast the audio for a simple computer programme that you could record
Same thing was done here in Brazil during the 80s and early 90s, just with it being MSX softwares and games instead of the C64. ;)
"The file size would be 5 hours" But what is 5 hours in a man's life if he can proudly say that he invented a new way to play Doom?
If you have a file size lasting longer than four hours, please seek emergency care immediately.
5 hour R2R doesn't exist.
@@simontay4851 "yet"
Actually that would be 10 hours if you add recording to and from together.
@@simontay4851 Split it with pkzip and put it across multiple reels :D
Up next: Mario on wax cylinder
The man's gone off the deep end folks. One day we'll find out he stored his consciousness on 5 records.
And an 8 track!
"Science could not save my body. My mind, however that was worth saving."
"I've never felt more alive!"
The year is 2120. The 8-bit Guy's great-great-grandson uploads a new video. "Loading LGR from reel-to-reel tapes"
Fallout 5 companion
@@zanite8650 excellent comment
Feels like a techmoan x LGR crossover
was thinking the same thing. lol
I legit thought i clicked on a new techmoan vid at first
Are we sure they aren't the same in some way.. but glad to see this is why the algorithm said if you like LGR your gonna like Techmoan
😊💯
And they said that Infinity War was the most ambitious crossover ever.
Eventually we are going to see an LGR Blerb of someone creating this episode to fit onto tape then be decoded back to play on PC.
According to the specs shown on the video the reel-to-reel could hold 230KB of data.
I re-encoded the canyon.mid playback part of this video in H.264 video (10 FPS, 320x240, 26KB/s) + AAC audio (64KB/s) and the output was a 1.36 MB file. Theoretically you could compress this further and maybe fit more data on that reel but I don't really know how.
@@gluttonousmaximus9048 I suppose only time will tell unless you really sit down and brute force it. Going back to the LGR Floppy Disk video on floppy though, even Clint said that video compression algorithms are definitely improving slowly but shortly. So perhaps another year or two from now?
Who knows. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yea a vhs tape ofcourse.
@@gluttonousmaximus9048 You can easily fit four times as much data on the reel because it's four track tape. Record the first chunk on the left, flip the tape over and use the other half, flip again and use the right, flip a fourth time and use the right.
I could fit it on a tape and play it back. _Pulls out a VHS_
How about: "Loading PC Games by singing or humming the audio signal"
Whistling and kazoo, too! Hey, maybe I’ll get as cancelled as Dr. Seuss!
Drrrrrrrr pshhhhhhh zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
@@angusmacfrankenstein7227 The phone freakers used a kazoo
reminds me of that hacker who convinced the court he was held trial by that he could communicate to modems by whistling to launch nukes
@@10upstudios so, it's basically Yondu but, instead of a flying arrow it's a nuke...?
Other tech channels: “Look how fast we can load this game up from this PCI Gen 4 SSD”
LGR: “Look how slowly we can load this game up from a reel-to-reel tape”
Yet only one of those videos is actually interesting. Hence, why I’m here.
umm… why is the ssd using pci? lol
@@zach_c Because you can actually add a controller for SSD through PCI
@@jesusguillen5054 I didn’t know you could do that and I don’t see why you would want to do that
@@zach_c If you are using a raspberry, as an instance, there is a good chance to add a SSD controller throught the PCIEx1 port in a compute module v4 and expand your memory huge time.
@@jesusguillen5054 i didn’t realise they had a pciex1 port on them; okay then, that would explain it
11:47 - I was fully expecting him to play back a KCS recording of canyon.mid, not an actual audio recording.
Me too! I tuned my speakers down in anticipation.
well, you could just do it yourself.
LOL
And now I wonder how long it would take to load compared to its actual run time.
As was I.
Canyon.mid playing off reel-to-reel might actually be the most LGR thing I've ever seen... err... heard.
No, that would be the Duke Nukem 3D theme.
Came for the analog to digital shenanigans. Stayed for the canyon.mid
Doesn’t get any better than this Canyon so 98 ish 😀
@@burtblando8806 MAKIN' BACON!!!! REEEEEEEEEEE, Hail to the KING, BABY!
"I don't want to create a ZIP file if I can avoid that" Is kind of ironic, since that was one of the first uses of such files: TAR (Tape ARchive)
Tar isn't compressed though
TAR isn't compressed bud. What are you talking about.
@@CiggyButtBrainnnn Is not about the compression, is about putting many files into a single file. Compression is just nice to have. But the simplest type of such files were initially created in order to be able to store multiple files into tape.
TIL what tars are
Huh, always thought .tar was named after tar balls.
"My mom always said tape recorders were like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get. Maybe even some extra byte."
Clint is slowly losing his marbles under a mountain of tech.
And covid...
Easy to lose marbles under a mountain of tech
He's like a college art thesis come to life. Deadly Comics stuff comes to mind.
I'm pretty sure Clint has already lost his marbles and now he's just searching for them under all the tech.
I think he has died and gone to heaven!
the inventor of the cassette tape died today, so covering a tape based thing seems fitting
Well, dead for now, they still have to flip him back over
Dutch inventor of the cassette tape, Lou Ottens, dies age 94. To be more precise, he died on March 6.
This is not a cassette tape.
@@belstar1128 If you read the main comment carefully it says ¨tape based thing ¨. Also the video is based on a Reel ¨Tape¨.
@@shukterhousejive I laughed so fucken hard
The "stowaway" is probably the BOM (Byte Order Mark) that is an optional indicator of how the bytes are ordered in a given encoding: Most significant first or least significant first (Big Endian/Little Endian)
Endianness defines whether 0001 or 1000 is bigger, so to speak.
That's pretty fancy, I store most of my old games on stacks of punch cards.
Loading games from reel-to-reel
Loading games from vinyl
Loading games from 8-track
Loading games from hieroglyphics on stone
Loading games from _hydrogen particles_
*I don't think we're in **_Kansas City Standard_** anymore, Toto*
You forgot punchcards.
Load games from wax cylinders
load games by playing an instrument in your room
Loading games from Edison cylinders.
Load games from multiple QR codes hand-carved into stone with a chisel.
Someday maybe: _"Loading Doom from a stone tablet"_
I mean hypothetically you could chizel out doom in its code form and then type it back into a computer. Video games used to come as code you had to hand type into your own computer after all.
@@juliaboon9741 or buy (or better yet, program) a visual sensor that can read the 1s and 0s off the stone tablet like a giant CD, like a Farside comic about Cavemen inventing a CD.
Hell, I'd pay to see doom run off an IBM punchcard
Moses did it already.
@@safacollective2400 punch-roll should be fast enough to provide the demo data
Clint effortlessly swaps between saying "daaaah-tuh" and "day-tah" and I can't unhear it now. Lol 😆
That canyon.mid at the end was so soothing I almost fell asleep to it!
LGR has truly become the Steve Albini of games.
"Songs About Computing" when?
@@nettils5555 Melvins, Nirvana, the Jesus Lizard...
If you've heard good rock, you've heard Albini
@@nettils5555 He is a musician/producer. You can look up Big Black, Rapeman, or Shellac for examples of his music. His producer credits are too many to list.
PC basic has a MUCH faster load/save tape routine. IIRC, it's like 4800 and not 1200.
This standard is 7 years older than the PC. It's ridiculous.
Atomizer and Songs About Fucking are my favorite BIG BLACK albums!
This sounds like everything I love combined.
Including an opportunity for a nice long sleep
This was so cool! I was just watching a movie on Sunday called "Westworld" from 1973 that had reel-driven computers, mom and I were talking about them since she grew up during that era (and even before them) and I grew up during the Windows 3.1 era. So cool, I LOVE older tech stuff, it fascinates me! Thanks for breaking everything down as well, made me understand it much better!
“We’re simply going in raw.” - Clint, LGR
GOAT
BAWWWLS
oooo
Raw is fine, as long as it’s not dry.
Going in bareback! RAW as in RAW audio... hehehehehehhee
This is what I'd expect if Techmoan and LGR did a colab video.
th-cam.com/video/58EitSEFzo8/w-d-xo.html
Another one?
Exactly! ⬆️
Good 'ol LGR...always making videos that no one ever asked for, but everyone wants 🤣😇
Very well said!
That theme seems to have held true throughout his channel. Not that I'm complaining though!
10 XD
This is the craziest and coolest concept I’ve seen in quite some time! Thank you for sharing this Clint! Honestly, this is one of the most informative and interesting experiments that I’ve seen as relates to retro tech, and I’m a massive fan of vintage A/V too, so, I’m just geeking out at the moment. That Tandberg is gorgeous!
Oh boy, you really took me back in time when I had 10 years and was fooling around with my commodore 64 and my datasette.
Same! I remember spilling soda all over grandma's Commodore and she was PISSED! I couldn't play for a couple of hours after that 🤣 I always loved going there as a kid. She always had the newest computer every time we'd go. And we'd usually get the old one to take home with us. First was the Commodore in the early 90s 🤣.
We had another my mom brought home from work that had the monochrome green & black screen. All I did was learn how to use Lotus 123 on there. It was a spreadsheet program she used at work to do payroll stuff lol. Here I am at like 10 years old and a master at Lotus 123 🤣
We can't copy this game! DRM coded!
-Hold my reel-to-reel.
Analog to the rescue!
Just like how The Jetsons thought we'd still be using at this point in time.
And now we know it's possible, just not practical.
Watching all those old sci-fi and spy movies as well as cartoons parodying them, you kind of have this vision of these large rooms that are all these giant wall to wall computers with large reel to reel sets attached to them, all beeping and blurting with consoles with large levers and glowing buttons. Knowing what we know now, they'd really just be a break room with a broken down vending machine and they'd have like five guys on their phones. Not really impressive or intimidating.
@@mightyfilm That's idealism vs. reality right there. There's always a grand vision of the future, but human nature invariably gets in the way.
Tape cartridges are still used for backups because they're cheap and works fine for sequential access. Reel-to-reel random access like what we saw on those old footage are definitely a thing of the past.
That tape deck probably cost the same now as it did when it was new. A great piece of vintage hardware.
This is the first time I've been able to smile since the Super Bowl
Yes... I'm from _Kansas City_
Is it bad that I'm curious to see a binary comparison of the two EXEs to see where the stray extra byte ended up?
I'm 95% sure that it's a NULL byte - i.e. 0x00. If you download the zip file for kcs and open kcs.lst in a text editor and scroll down near the end where it says "\DEFAULTS" - you will see that nullchar is the default - i.e. "nullchar after CR".
For decoding: KCS -y -u testtape.wav testtape.txt = the options are to ignore errors and cuts mode (1200 baud).
Also if you look at the kcs.lst more, it looks like it actually writes the null to the wav file. Search for :ENCODE.
I'm still looking, but I think that the null at the start of the program is actually ignored. I cant find the source code for KCS, and it's not worth my time to decompile it to find out if it's using an actual 0x00 character for null, or if its actually 0x90 (x86 NOP).
Since I dont have a setup to duplicate this, I'm curious about the extra character as well, and to see if my guess is right.
@@noahb717 I just fucked around with it for a few hours and I can confirm it adds a NO Operation byte. 0x90. Hence no effect. I was hoping to find some sort of cool signature but there just are not enough bits used to represent anything meaningful outside an instruction code. Time in life well spent.
@@azzajohnson2123 Seriously, I was really wanting to see this too. If you feel like it was a waste of time I would like to let you know that at least my dumb ape self will sleep better having an answer. Thank you too Noah and Knux.
Can't he just run the diff command or the windows standard. I want to see where it went too.
This would be the most thematic way to play Control.
I didn't even want to think of how much tape you would need to store Control on it
what's that game?
@@iLiokardo It's an initially PS4 exclusive game. You collect all sorts of SCP knockoff objects to defeat some interdimensional menace. I've yet to beat it myself, but don't take my blasé description for it, try it yourself.
Control does have Floppy discs. Only modern tech is banned.
I love the fact that the pirated-looking copy of Kroz has "Legit Disk!" handwritten on it and is signed by Scott Miller (the author).
wow. that finale got me right in the feels. Cheers man. Thank you as always for the astounding content.
My brother-in-law is very into old projectors. He blew my mind when he showed me how the audio works in those things. It basically turns light into audio, might make a cool video? It is very old tech, tube technology, which is still used today of course.
It's pretty cool seeing the waveform right next to the picture frame, right?
Machines that loaded off cassette tape could load something off anything that can make the necessary sounds.
About 15 years ago people did load Spectrum games off an MP3 player
There's an android app to load spectrum games off your phone 😅
I still do! Only now I use my a smartphone and I alternate between my Speccy and my Acorn Electron. 😁
I've seen someone use an iPod or some similar device load games into a C64 with an audio file. Heck, I'm pretty sure you can use a discman for that.
I used to do so, these days SD card interfaces are a thing
MP3 and ATRAC (Sony Minidisc) are lossy formats, they're quite bad for this purpose and often fail. As the encode / decode design is such that information human's can't easily hear is masked / thrown away, the resulting file will have data errors. I've had limited success - you really need to stick with WAV/AIFF files, something lossless, sadly. MiniDisc would otherwise be a great way to work with vintage machines instead of tape. Recordable small optical discs.
imagine if, when you bought a steam game, they sent you a big ass tape reel
I'm still miffed that games aren't stored on Laserdisc-sized discs with suitably epic cover art.
Might as well with the internet connection speeds ive been getting recently haha
Imagine loading modern games on tape. You might die of old age first.
This is why I love your channel. Loved it. Fascinating stuff.
So that explains why dialup was so slow.. same concept just over a phone line
At 300 baud you could read text faster than it could be sent to you
@@zoomosis yeah but back in 1991 it was the coolest thing ever.
It could go waaaay faster than that. Reel tape at 15 IPS is way overkill as a data storage. Not to mention, using different modulation or some way of encoding the audio stream instead of simple beeps and bloops. You could store several times more data on single side of reel if you wanted to. Cassette tape can do much better than what LGR presented, and regular cassette is much worse than reel to reel format in many aspects.
@@override7486 I agree. What do you think is the total bandwidth of that tape?
I miss my US Robotics DX52 modem.
Is this a tease for an inevitable Techmoan crossover?
th-cam.com/video/58EitSEFzo8/w-d-xo.html
Lol everything looks like the guy from superman 3 when he was messing up with the computers and the banks servers started to reel the wheels . Amazing vid mate
I was waiting for it for a long time! Thank you very much for such experiment!
Todd Howard with Skyrim: *heavy breathing*
5:42 “we’re simply going in raw...”’Clint you make me blush 😂☺️ great work as always!! 👍🏼
😂
:\
Thank you for your videos, and for your passion. I learn something new from you all the time.
This is great, learnt so much new stuff from this I didn't know before. Thanks, LGR!
I have "fond" memories of loading Hunt the Wumpus from cassette on our TI-99 when I was a kid... Clint, have you made a TI-99 video?
He made a TRS-80 CoCo video. I was really hoping he would have saved a file from the Win98 box and tried loading it on the TRS80.
I recall actually loading Ti-99 software in native format from ¼" tape on an old Tandberg deck. The tape was originally recorded from an FM radio broadcast.
TI-99/4A club! We had Frogger and Centipede on tape!
I somehow find this more fascinating than modern tech.
Absolutely love the midi! Very chill!
Great concept! Thoroughly enjoyed.
Next LGR: "Loading PC games from Hieroglyphics!"
Loading music from Barcodes. Oh wait, Casio did keyboards that would actually do that.
@@MrDuncl But can you do it with actual audio files? Lets find out soon...
@@bmhater1283 I think that would require far too much data. The Casio data was more like MIDI data but before any Casio had MIDI.
agyptians used to write messages on real "hard disks" made of concrete
I'm confused as to why this video isn't titled "Clint has finally gone off the deep end"
You never cease to surprise me with someone new and intriguing! Your content is extremely mesmerizing. Thanks you saucy little boy! :)
This is great! This is the same level of supernerdyness than connecting a floppy disk to a smartphone! I love it!
Saw that title popping up and was sold within less than a milli second... impressive!
1:35 I've lived in Kansas City my whole life and never knew that was a thing.
Same
Loved this video. Keep truckin as always
You're simply amazing, Clint! Keep on!
I feel like Techmoan would approve of this 😂 😂.
this is some Disco Elysium "radio computer" stuff, and I'm HERE FOR IT
This is eccentric even for you. There is something incredibly satisfying about watching a reel to reel player, thank you.
That was one of my favorite videos of yours
fact: tape drives are still used, and are ridiculously sized and expensive.
Yep. Tapes can survive anything!
@@ItsRawdraft2 tapes can survive,drives and decks not
@@namesurname4666 Depends. Storage-spec drives can work for ridiculously long times and have massive service lives. One Google search away my guy
Expensive maybe, but not ridiculously so if you need mass archival storage. An IBM LTO8 tape costs $95 and can hold 30TB compressed, which is less than $4/TB.
Even factoring in a $4000 tape drive, 1 PB of archival storage would be $7230, or $7.23/TB. At that scale, nothing can compete with the price. The cheapest, biggest WD/Seagate/Toshiba HDDs are $24/TB, four times more, and they're probably not rated for super long-term storage.
@@radeklew1 but drives cost a lot and not ideal at all for home, also accessing data should be slower like fast forwarding and rewind
Does the reel reveal secrets when played _backwards_ though? 😏
If audio played backwards contains satanic messages, data reels played backwards just run Doom. Edit: ffs, this is what I get for commenting before watching the video. What happens when he plays Doom backwards on a reel?
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@@suborbitalprocess The Icon of Sin gets replaced by John Romero
Woz is a dead man
Miss him miss him
Sadly no.
Like if you play Moob.You're a marine that spew out demons.
mate these vids are so good! the way you edit and narrate them to sooo satisfying and i freaking love it. please keep going!
Tandberg tape backups are actually really darn cool to watch! I think it was a 4U 250TB backup unit. The old animation studio I used to work for had one of those backup systems that used fiber as the input. It had a clear window on it and you could actually see the tapes in motion. Soo cool to watch! Great video LGR!
This was really cool. Also, I love that monitor stand.
Ikea
No one, absolutely no one:
LGR: Reel to Reel Tape game loading!
Neat
please stop with the “no one” thing, it’s not funny anymore
@@poble was it ever?
@@poble why is it not funny?
@@bcafed come think of it, yeah, it was never funny lol
@@mar_katje because it’s overused and unoriginal
Seriously something I was wondering about for 30 years or so :) TY!
Great video!! Another awesome LGR thing!! 😎👍👏👏
takes me back to the good old days. loading SubLogic FS-1 from cassette to a TRS-80. the volume control had to be set just right or it wouldn't load.
I'd be interested to see this experiment carried out using the built-in cassette interface on the original IBM 5150 or PCJr...
I have been doing this with apple IIs for years heck reel to reel was used back in the Altair 8800 days because the frequency range wasnt to great on most cassette recorders
Sounds like something for The 8-Bit Guy. :D
The original IBM interface _should_ be faster (because IBM literally clocked it faster), but only those two machines had all the hardware, so Clint would need to build an ISA card & solder in a tap to the PC speaker/buzzer (which is actually where the outgoing signal originated!).
@@jacksong6226 While reel to reel should be far better, with cassette recorders it always seemed that the cheap shoebox recorders worked best. Good bass response or noise reduction is is no advantage at all with computer tapes.
I love your channels for stuff like this
Love this kind of stuff! This is PURE LGR: Clint having all sorts of fun and taking us along for his shenanigans.
"nobody would bother wasting reel to reel for data"
*IBM MAINFAMES FURIUSLY TYPING*
Fun fact those actually Used vacuum sealed tapes and the tape would fall to the floor to creat slack so that if it had an error it could back up the tape without snapping it
@@jacksong6226 yea its actually quite interesting to see, they have quite alot of slack on either reel side so they can run some crazy speeds on the tape w/o shredding it, its not just for error correction but fast seeks/start and stops
12:00 - 14:00 someone should make a 10 hour nostalgia video of it on loop that screensaver is iconic
I absolutely love this. canyon.mid at the end is a perfect closer to it. Bravo.
This was really awesome!!! I didn't know this was even possible!
They were so pre occupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should... 😂
life.....uh....finds a way
"Science isn't about why, its about why not?!" - Cave Johnson
Love your videos man !
Love this LGR oddity thing! R2R always reminds me of my dad who owns a recording studio. As a kid, I'd stare at those reels hypnotically. Best outro ever for a video, too!
Someone gave me a reel-to-reel player about 25 years ago. I had no idea what to do with it, so I got rid of it. If only I had known then what I learned today. 🙂
"Farts and balls" (4:15). LGR's way of saying "let's do this"!! :)
Oh man, i really dig these videos combining vintage audio gear and PC tech. Some of my favorite stuff!
When you said Cool Edit 96 I fainted. This is the best video on TH-cam for me now
Well, that explains those spinney things in Willy Wonka...
The ending portion of this video is giving off some real Techmoan vibes.
Your best video in much time. Superb. Congratulations.
Dude this video is so awesome. More people should watch this
Those PC speakers you got there are just so fucking typical for that time! Even i had the exact ones here in Sweden at that time!
And these reels go like "I like to move it, move it!"
Greetings from Germany
Thanks! Brought tears to my eyes.
Never knew I needed to know this, but now I do. Thanks Clint.
Next stop: storing a single MP3 file in a full cassette for the lulz
You're just making a DCC (Digital Compact Cassette) with more steps and a bump up from MPEG-1 Layer 2 to Layer 3 lol
Is this for reel?
Yes, it reely is.
that was actually really cool! I always wondered how old computer systems used tape to run programs... now I know, and got the most ridiculous demo of the concept to show how it works! thank you, Clint, for going above and beyond to do something so absurd
God your videos are so good. I mean the content is amazing but can we also just mention the amazing b-roll and editing? Everything is so smooth and progressional. Keep going my dude