Inspired by a forgotten 1980s console, one creator is using VHS tapes to build wonderfully strange, interactive versions of Doom and Super Mario Bros.
  • betanumerus@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    My first video game (Zaxxon) was on a cassette tape, before VHS (early 80s). Each time we wanted to start a gaming session, we had to download the game from a shoebox cassette player to the CoCo 2 computer, and it took 2 or 3 minutes.

  • PerfectDark@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    22·
    2 days ago

    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 :)

    • Redfox8@slrpnk.netEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      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!

      • Eldritch@piefed.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Throaty’s implementation was unique though. His videos are often rather long. But generally entertaining and informative enough to watch.

  • WesternInfidels@feddit.onlineEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    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.

  • NullPointerException@lemmy.caEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      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.

  • xSikes@feddit.onlineEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    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.

  • ramble81@lemmy.zipEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    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.