The explanation and history are certainly neat, but the payoff was very underwhelming. Kinda like finding out it’s just a message to drink more ovaltine ;P
What sort of payoff were you expecting? I was satisfied that this guy managed to extract the binary and run it on a legacy machine. The tools worked as expected and in the end we found the artist's message.
I have incredible appreciation for folks that invest their time and effort in tech archaeology.
I had some old Dragon 32 tapes from days of old. And when the emu scene turned up, managed to record the tape onto the PC, play an unfinished game of my youth, snapshot it so I could cheat until I finally completed the damn thing. For all of like two minutes I was king.
Agreed that the result is underwhelming, however, I am amazed that, of all things, a Christian Rock band chose to undertake such a task, even if it was outsourced. I wonder what their motive was? I mean, it’s certainly a bunch of work for a very small result.
There’s no way to direct input the vinyl into a C64, so therefore it would be necessary to record it onto tape, such as the case presented here, which would have been fairly expensive at the time, and then, yes, use a tape loader accessory for a C64 at the time...the budget, it seems, for the average listener to have the gear to decode this, much less know to do it, seems to indicate an astronomically improbable level of discoverability.
> [..] it would be necessary to record it onto tape, such as the case presented here, which would have been fairly expensive at the time,
and then, yes, use a tape loader accessory for a C64 at the time...the budget, it seems, for the average listener to have the gear to decode this, much less know to do it, seems to indicate an astronomically improbable level of discoverability.
Oh, no at all, distribution of software as audio was not exactly common but wasn't unusual either. In the Netherlands there was a radio programme that broadcast C64 programs you could record on cassette. Some printed computer magazines included software on flexi discs which were thin, flexible vinyl sheet records.
Record players and double cassette decks, like the one in the the video, were ubiquitous back than. Double cassette decks were the means of choice for copying cassette software because this was much faster than on the computer. The
Datasette was much cheaper than a 1541 floppy drive. Recording the audio from a record to tape and loading it via Datasette was a minor inconvenience compared to other methods of software distribution used back then.
The usual way to get new software, and with that I mean software you couldn't copy from your friends, was to just type it from a computer magazine. A considerable part of the old magazines was printed program code you could type in and run. I deliberately didn't write source code - it was raw hex listings. The typical form, if I remember correctly, was two columns with 17 hex pairs in each line. 16 bytes were program, one byte was a checksum. You would enter it in a program that would make an annoying buzzer sound when you hit enter at the end of the line and the checksum didn't match. The program I used was from a German computer magazine and aptly named checksummer, which is a nice wordplay on checksum and summer which is German for buzzer. So software on records was neither inconvenient nor expensive.
One hex listing starts at page 42. Format is a little different from what I remembered, 8 bytes code plus 1 byte checksum, four columns of that on a magazine page.
This pulled on a half forgotten ancient memory I have of my Dad recording “Basicode”[1] audio off the radio to run on our BBC B in the UK.
From reading the link I’ve attached it seems this was related to your Dutch broadcasts too. I never knew the history but it’s really interesting to read about after all these years.
Good Lord, I'd have killed for that checksum feature you mention. I've spent hours typing pages of hex into a TI-994a with no such functionality, and typically you'd just have bugs that would require a careful re-reading of all the hex vals.
Component hifi systems were the norm in this time period. It would have been a trivial matter to record from vinyl to a cheap audio cassette on any basic system AV system. They even made cheap vinyl/tape decks as well.
Compact cassettes were used as a typical method for dictation for this time period. They were quite inexpensive even in the 1960s, let alone the 80s. I used to have a monaural battery tape recorder as a child with plenty of blank tapes in 1981, and was poor. This was not expensive stuff, less than a dollar per tape.
Further the group of people that would be in the market for a C64 or earlier tended to be more tech savvy then when PCs had mass adoption.
I think the “challenge” here is much more finding the track after the run out, especially with an auto return deck. Also while there are notable counter examples, Christian rock listeners is not exactly overlapping with the tech crowd in a large way. This was an obscure album.
If this had existed on a metal album it would have been found day 1, I guarantee it.
As to effort. Seems pretty simple. Record program to tape... put on master. This wasn’t any great feat of engineering.
I think they did it because they could, because it was fun. Because you could tell someone else you did it and they'd say "wow". But to get a wow these days takes a lot more!
Where I live, cheap cassette players where _everywhere_ in the 80's. Most people had record players too, and getting the sounds to a tape would be the easy part.
C64's on the other hand, was much less common, but if someone had a cassette deck, a record player AND a C64, you can bet that he/she would have had a cassette player for the C64 as well.
Why would it be expensive? Back in those days, reasonably cheap turntable/cassette stereo systems were plentiful and found in most homes where you might find a C64. And a tape loader was the poor man's floppy drive.
Ha ha, true - but it's in back end of the RUN OUT GROOVE! There are tonnes of C64 programs on vinyl - but this really is an easter egg: hidden from 99% of auto-stop record players. Damn genius... but also, a run out groove is not a lot of BASIC commands!
