40 years later, a game for the ZX Spectrum will be again broadcast over FM radio

It's a bit before my time, and tape based games never really caught on in the US as far as I'm aware, but I've always been kind of fascinated by storing programs in audio.

There's something bizarrely cool about the idea of taking something designed for an analog medium and using it for something sort of definitionally not analog. It was traditionally cassette tapes, but I saw a YouTube video where some companies distributed games on CDs, and there's something kind of weird and anachronistic about being able to play a ZX Spectrum game off a CD; the program is going from Digital (being written) -> analog (converted to audio signals) -> digital (put on a CD) -> analog (back to audio) -> digital (read by the computer). People can be pretty clever sometimes.

Was cassette tape storage more common in Europe than the U.S? I’m too young to have been around for this era, but I’ve just never seen it over here.

If I remeber correctly BBC also used to do this back in the day.

For those far away from Slovenia, is the broadcast available over the internet (I know, I know)? This link says it's not available because of "regional restrictions":

https://tunein.com/radio/Radio-Student-893-s25182/

Edit: Found a working link: https://onlineradiobox.com/si/tudent/?cs=si.tudent&played=1

This triggers a lot of nostalgic feelings. We also had that in Belgrade during 80s, in a radio show hosted by late Zoran Modli. I even recorded some of emmited games although I didn't have a computer at a time. Access to software, music, or any kind of information was hard, slow, and limited back then.

Hats off to Žiga Turk and Moj Mikro magazine. That one along with Svet Kompjutera and Računari was the main source of IT knowledge for hungry minds in ex Yugoslavia.

I sometimes mention that our radio used to broadcast games you could tape off the air to young people and they fail to grasp the futuristic glory I experienced when I explained to myself it's like one-way modem.

What I'm most curious about is if this was always just a happy side-effect of cassette-based data storage, or if they put specific effort into making this work. Ie. by being resilient to noise before and after a broadcast, having error correction, etc.

I fondly remember the Pete Shelley album “XL-1” which had a final track that contained a spectrum program.

You dropped the needle on the record and pressed ‘Run’ simultaneously and it would display an animated set of patterns in sync with the music - and the song lyrics

Is this meant to confuse the aliens by suggesting we've decided to go back to 8 bits? (Love it, btw.)

A friend of mine had faulty wiring in his house, the electricity would go out for a few brief moments whenever someone would ring his house bell. He would stand in front of his house when ZX Spectrum games were being broadcast so nobody would ring and interrupt his recorder :)

Out of curiosity, are there Linux tools to go from binary files to audio and back again? i.e `cat archive.zip | faxify -wav > archive.zip.wav`

Now could be the right time to put your old tape recorder on eBay (If you are in Slovenia) ;)

Back in the day, there were magazines that had a flexible plastic LP/single (aka 'vinyl'), that you'd play on your stereo, and record to cassette, and load into the computer.

Coincidentally, it's this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FePROXUG6E

It should be possible to capture using a sound card.

This is so cool! Does anyone know how the data is encoded in the signal? Is it just data for the game that's transmitted (and the logic resides on the ZX Spectrum) or is logic also transmitted?

The user manual is also quite awesome :) Here's the bit about copy protection (translation is mine):

Programs cannot be copy-protected successfully. KONTRABANT 2 is protected only insofar as not just anyone can look at its databases. Therefore you could copy it to whomever you wish.

Know that by doing so you will be nipping Yugoslavia's young software industry in the bud and hurt us, the enthusiasts who are writing it. You will also be hurting yourself. Programs will become more expensive due to smaller sales or won't come to exist in the first place.

Copying programs is hurting everything ALL of us computer folk have fought for. We've already achieved that anyone can buy a modest computer legally without humiliating themselves at a border crossing while YOU can help us breathe our local soul into these machines.

I'd like to have a listen to those waves and I'm not in Slovenia, any source on the internet?

Edit: Found a short sample of a Commodore Datasette program on Wikipedia[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Datasette.ogg

Back in the eighties the Dutch radio network NOS broadcast programs for all types of home computers. They even invented a common BASIC dialect for this to work: BASICODE https://archive.org/details/BASICODE2Manual This was sent on AM, so it was available in other European countries as well.

FYI, there's a fun indie game from 2016 on all the major platforms called Lumo[1] that's an homage to the isometric puzzle/adventure games of the ZX Spectrum era. I didn't really know anything about said era, as it was mostly before my time, but I ended up looking up a bunch of stuff as I played and it gave me an appreciation for it. The director/developer has a full walkthrough with commentary on YouTube where he explains everything.[2]

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/345480/Lumo/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHaRTzqB6QC9uzqnwNViw...

This is AWESOME! But, I absolutely love this time period of computing history.

It was around this time (late 70s), before storage was accessible to computer nerds, that the Kansas City Standard was developed. It provided a cheap and easy way to store "large" amounts of data on standard audio cassettes which were cheap and easy to come by!

It really opened up a lot of things! People no longer needed to retype their programs in to the computer every time they turned it on, it was now easy to share & copy data with friends, and it ALSO gave us the ability to broadcast programs over the radio (like this article is doing!).

The original Kansas City Standard was pretty slow (300 baud), but other standards were developed shortly after (CUTS [Bob Marsh] is one) which provided more speed (1200 baud) and even backward compatibility with KCS.

If anyone is interested in a the dirty details of how KCS all works, I did a series on it (https://youtu.be/6m7vDhscGzU). And am working on covering CUTS in the near future!

There was a game on Shakin' Stevens' album where you had to hide from bats and open green doors, and even the prawn cracker like snack Skips had a game, colin the biker. Mad times.

With minimodem and some streaming service you can mimic that, but as a client you need to cache the data with mplayer or mpv to avoid losing data:

http://www.whence.com/minimodem/

As a silly test, I encoded the Spanish versions of the Sherlock Holmes' volumes (XZ compressed each one) to FLAC with minimodem --tx 300, and later I converted them to Opus at 64 Kbps.

Each file weighted less than 30MB, not bad at all. The raw WAV files were around 400MB each.

The files were re-read back with minimodem --rx at the same rate and dumped back to an XZ file, the sha512sum matched the originals.

It's funny how we used to have games over radio waves (this, article, but 40 yars ago), then went through a bunch of other media (cartridges, floppies, cds, dvds, blurays,...) and then came back to games over radio waves (download via mobile network).

I remember how proud of myself I was when I connected the computer's audio inputs to a standard casette player with speed up function so I could load the games twice as fast.