In the Sinclair era we used cassettes instead of discs. It was shitty but cheap solution.
And for some reason, copying the tapes via a double-deck never worked. I had to use software like Mr. Copy to copy over the tapes I borrowed from a classmate.
Same with Commodore and my Japanese drum machine from the 90s.
Stands to reason that VHS would put that “on steroids”, relatively speaking.
Eeeeeh, not as much as you might think. Well at least not compared to something designed for it like lto tapes etc.
There’s some projects on guthub that turns sound into files same deal. Interesting way to convert and its been around for a long time.
Link?
Ah, yes. 300 lines of basic from a magazine, wrote it to a cassette tape and played it back when I wanted to play the game.
Only to find out that there was a typo in the magazine, and 8 year old me had no knowledge on what was wrong, except "error in line 130“
Most of the actual news about this project has already been covered elsewhere, so this is really just me indulging my love of strange physical gaming media and the wonderfully impractical things people come up with.
I’ve always been fascinated by oddities from gaming history, and the idea of someone getting Doom and Super Mario Bros. working with VHS tapes was far too interesting for me to ignore.
So here’s a little/casual dive into GCVHS, the bizarre Action Max console from 1987, and why I think there’s something super curious about people finding new uses for old technology. Sometimes I just like writing about things because they’re weird :)
I haven’t watched the YT yet, but interesting to read how they came up with an alternate way to ‘play’ the game. I expected a zx spectrum type setup where the data was loaded onto the hardware and played from there. That’s some dedication/passion to effectively create a whole new system!
P.s. Keep up with the weird, if we were all ‘normal’ life would be painfully dull!
VHS games is nothing new, like said on the post there where some VHS consoles in the past.
Here’s a video from Nostalgia Nerd showing some of the games and console. https://youtu.be/WI133HNGNfk
Throaty’s implementation was unique though. His videos are often rather long. But generally entertaining and informative enough to watch.
This was already a thing. There was a Captain Power set of VHS tapes that had VFX patterns that works with a toy with IR sensors and interacts with the toy.
So the VHS version of DOOM is something like Dragon’s Lair, but way more seamless. That’s amazing.
It’s almost nothing like using a cassette drive to store your BASIC game code.
The only question here is how many bytes per minute the VHS can hold. I’ve played several games in music cassette tapes. They played in normal speed and sounded like a modem after the handshake. IIRC, It took more than 20 minutes to load Hero and, sometimes, it didn’t work.
LGR has a video about Danmere Backup system which used your home VCR for backups. It apparently could store up to 4GB to a normal VHS-tape. Quick search around the net didn’t find much other than LGRs video and random snippets, but apparently that was slow, roughly 4MB/minute. But at the time when a lot of people didn’t even have storage on their computers up to gigabytes, so it could’ve been a viable option, but I haven’t heard about anyone who’d actually used a thing like that.
C-cassettes on Commodre 64 were a common thing and in here even the national broadcasting company sent some programs over the FM radio during nights.
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I had a TI-99/4A and backed up games that in input manually from a magazine, on to a cassette tape. My tape recorder had a counter so that you could put multiple programs on a single tape. The fun part was if you forgot to reset the counter or the tape wasn’t rewound to zero you could get half of one program plus half of another.
Bang! Yeehaw!
