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Stefan Viljoen wrote:
> Ever had something "saved" to an audio cassette, and you had to PLAY it back
> to the computer? And if it played too softly or loudly it would be
> scrambled?
Ah yes! You get brinky-brinks on TRS-80 when tape is right! :-)
> I remember doubling them (they held 120KB if I remember right) by turning a
> store-bought one over, and cutting another write-protect notch at the
> opposite side, so I could write on the "backside" of the disc, storing 240KB
> (wow, that's a LOT!) on one disc.
That too.
I remember when Myst came out on CD too and thought "Well, so much for
pirating games. You've got like 20x the size of a hard drive on this thing,
you could never copy it." :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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Stefan Viljoen <pov### [at] polard com> wrote:
> Ever had something "saved" to an audio cassette, and you had to PLAY it back
> to the computer? And if it played too softly or loudly it would be
> scrambled?
It was possible to recognize the type of data by the sound. For example,
the very first thing that the vast majority of Spectrum games did was to
load a loading screen (usually a depiction of the cover art, sometimes
something else), and that made a very distinctive sound which I could
instantly recognize even today.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> which I could instantly recognize even today.
That's hardcore. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > which I could instantly recognize even today.
>
> That's hardcore. :-)
Puts me in mind of the blind character in 'Sneakers' who could tell what sort of
wiring they were snooping by the buzz it made over his speaker.
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Darren New wrote:
> Warp wrote:
>> which I could instantly recognize even today.
>
> That's hardcore. :-)
That's nothing.
I saved specially designed images to tape to try to reverse-engineer the
algorithm for turning colours into tones. I figured out that if you save
in image composed of horizontal bands of colour, the tape contained a
series of long, continuous tones, and they changed order depending on
which colours you used.
(Recall that the Spectrum stores scanlines in a weird order though...)
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> That's nothing.
>
> I saved specially designed images to tape to try to reverse-engineer the
> algorithm for turning colours into tones. I figured out that if you save
> in image composed of horizontal bands of colour, the tape contained a
> series of long, continuous tones, and they changed order depending on
> which colours you used.
Have you ever heard of sing-song?
This was a C64-program that played a tune on your floppy by repositioning
the read/write head.
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TC wrote:
> This was a C64-program that played a tune on your floppy by repositioning
> the read/write head.
I wrote a program once that you could set a radio on the console and it
would play music with the interference from the bus lines. You know, back
in the days when instructions ran at roughly the speed of AM radio
wavelengths. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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Darren New wrote:
> TC wrote:
>> This was a C64-program that played a tune on your floppy by repositioning
>> the read/write head.
>
> I wrote a program once that you could set a radio on the console and it
> would play music with the interference from the bus lines. You know, back
> in the days when instructions ran at roughly the speed of AM radio
> wavelengths. :-)
I consider THAT hardcore.
I remember how my dad cursed when he found out the Apple interfered
precisely on his ham radio frequencies.
No, he never bother to try shielding it, we got a IBM PC next. As I remember
it was still noisy in the ham bands but much less than the Apple was.
--
Stefan Viljoen
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Stefan Viljoen wrote:
> I consider THAT hardcore.
Hardcore would be still remembering which instruction loops made which
tones. :-)
Someone else did a program that played the opening of the Fifth Symphony by
controlling the hammer timing on the line printer while it printed out a
2-page ascii-art picture of beethoven. That's was pretty cool. :-)
Or playing taps with a program that fit in the 16 registers of the machine
after you'd told it to power down and the memory was no longer online. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Is God willing to prevent phrogams, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing, to prevent phrogams?
Then he is malevolent.
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > which I could instantly recognize even today.
> That's hardcore. :-)
Well, not really. Images are far from being as random as eg. machine
code or other game data. After all, images are not just noise, but have
tons of patterns in them.
As someone commented, Spectrum used a rather weird ordering for the screen
pixels (for some reason I never understood; maybe they thought they were being
smart or something, but it really backfired; after all, I'm sure that when
they first designed the architecture they didn't even think that it would
actually be used to play full-fledged full-screen games):
The first 32 bytes in the screen memory represented the first line of
pixels (256 of them). The next 32 bytes represented the *eigth* line of
pixels. The next 32 bytes represented the *sixteenth* line of pixels,
and so on, until you get to one third of the screen, ie. 8 such groups
of 32 bytes, after which the next 32 bytes represented the second line
of pixels, the next 32 bytes the ninth line, and so on. Then it went to
the second third of the screen, and then the third third, in the same way.
(Besides those being nice "round" numbers, otherwise that ordering makes
absolutely no sense, and I don't think there's a single person in existence
who understands why they chose such a weird ordering. It only made coding
games a lot harder than it had to be. Well, programmers learned to cope.)
After those, the next 32x24 bytes had the color data.
Anyways, both the fact that images contain regular patterns instead of
random pixels *and* that weird ordering made an image saved on casette to
have a rather distinctive sound which any Spectrum user would recognize
immediately. The color data itself also made a relatively distinctive
sound, especially coming immediately after the pixel data, which made it
immediately recognizable when the color data begun.
(One nice thing about all that data being mapped to RAM into consecutive
memory locations is that you could load an image directly from a casette
to the screen, and watch it form while loading, in real-time.)
--
- Warp
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