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What If Video Games Came on VHS? One Modder Is Finding Out (gardinerbryant.com)
submitted 22 hours ago by [M] to c/games@lemmy.world
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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 :)

all 24 comments

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[–] 1 point 2 hours ago

strange physical media

VHS

dies inside

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    [–] 9 points 14 hours ago

    Commodore 64 had cassette games.

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    [–] 39 points 21 hours ago (7 children)

    For what it's worth the first computer I played on had games on cassette tapes

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  • [–] 5 points 20 hours ago (5 children)

    The important question is: did it support turbo or only the slow loading?

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  • [–] 1 point 19 hours ago (3 children)

    What is turbo loading?

    I just had an idea what the old generations could have done to load games faster. If you buy multiple cassettes and readers, then connect them to master device (to start and stop with a single button), and load them all at once from different positions. Basically hardware level multi-threaded loading if you will. I mean cutting the loading in half would be a huuge improvement already. Would this have been possible?

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  • [–] 4 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

    No idea if that was possible back then. My computer was only able to load from one cassette player. And it was slooow. Until my father (who was an electronics engineer) upgraded it somehow to support a turbo mode, it required pushing an additional button on the cassette player, and it just ran faster. The sound had a much higher pitch and the loading sometimes failed. But it was much faster.

    I also remember "copying the game" by typing the machine code printed in the magazine. Funny times.

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  • [–] 3 points 16 hours ago* (1 child)

    Machine code or BASIC possibly? I remember PC magazines hat sometimes BASIC games printed. At that time I didn't own any sort of computer, so was always curious what that even was. I don't remember seeing any machine code, but at that time everything was BASIC for me.

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  • [–] 2 points 13 hours ago

    I think it was assembly, I am not sure what it was exactly (remember but 100% sure it wasn't basic, because I was also trying to learn Basic back then. I would have recognized it. I knew a few Basic commands, so naturally I tried to write my own operating system. Hey, I was a kid

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    • [–] 14 points 21 hours ago (1 child)

    You can play games on cassettes using MSX,

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  • [–] 6 points 19 hours ago

    Commodore, Amiga, Atari, amstrad, specy, oliveti, dragon 32, Tandy. Just about any 8 bit computer other than Mac or IBM PC it was the standard. I think the apple II could, but it wasn't common.

    But I definitely remember being over at a friends. Letting the commodore load while we did something else for 5 to 10 minutes.

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    • [–] 6 points 18 hours ago (1 child)

    Lol, I love how some people are like: what if we make it worse?

    It does sound like a fun project though. 😛

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    • [–] 10 points 20 hours ago* (1 child)

    My Atari used cassettes too. All things considered, I prefer NVMe drives and SSDs.

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  • [–] 2 points 20 hours ago

    You can have cassette images on your NVMe and SSD drives. :D In an emulator they load basically instantly (if the emulator supports such functionality to load them quickly). In example C64 cassettes load basically in an instant, instead 20 minutes.

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    • [–] 3 points 20 hours ago (1 child)

    I have yet to read the article. My first thought is, that we had videogames on tape already, like those audio tapes. Now I personally never interacted with such device, but my friend told me and off course I have emulation with dumps of games that were on tape. It's like having the game on disc, but loads extremely slow before game can be started.

    I will read the article and may or may not add more comments. Love these topics.

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  • [–] 1 point 20 hours ago*

    Ah, I see how this works in this tape system. I thought it would load everything into memory and then play it, like those old cassette tapes. But looks like its similar to those full motion CD and Laserdisc games... wait:

    with eight video streams running simultaneously on the tape

    Okay, this is intriguing! Sounds like a QuickTime event game.

    Rather than making the entire experience out of branching prerecorded scenes, the system uses imagery stored on the tape as a backdrop for gameplay generated by the external hardware.

    I imagine it plays out similar to how these LCD Game and Watch games are? But not able to move a character, I have no clue how this works.

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    • [–] 1 point 17 hours ago

    Is it coded in Malbolge, though?

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    [–] 1 point 21 hours ago (4 children)

    Hi! I believe you are the author of the blog? Thank you for this interesting article!

    It's off-topic, but you wrote under it that Google said that they were dismantling their search platform; what do you mean by that?

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  • [–] 4 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

    I am not the author but I did find this depressing AF article.

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  • [–] 4 points 20 hours ago* (2 children)

    And sometimes the product in question involves the basic nuts and bolts of the internet itself. By which I mean: Google

    I know that mine is a minority opinion, but I need to voice my dissent here: all Google products could disappear from the interwebz right now and it wouldn't put a dent in my usage/habits.

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  • [–] 1 point 20 hours ago (1 child)

    That's excellent! I'm with you and agree that we're the minority.

    The center point of dialogue on this topic isn't about Google specifically though. It's addressing the rug pull of the internet we were sold on while it was being built, and enshittification more generally. Not merely its possibility or even inevitability within capitalism but that the enshittification of everything is being normalized while the internet the public built is being stripped for parts by robber-barons.

    So much so that industries built around norms, and all of the labor and jobs within them, are being lost. Even setting ideals aside for a moment: the harm that brings to the lives of working class people is immense. A minor apocalypse with long-term consequences all for short-term gains for a scant few over a handful of financial quarters. The beast is eating itself in real-time.

    Even for those who champion it the reality of the situation is sour at best.

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  • [–] 0 points 20 hours ago

    The center point of dialogue on this topic isn’t about Google specifically though.

    You mean this post? Obviously not. Or the article quoted above? Reads like being very specifically about Google to me.

    the rug pull of the internet we were sold on while it was being built

    Honestly, this is gobbledigook for me. My internet is not being rugpulled, I was never sold it (apart from paying my ISP) and I was a small child without a computer when it was being built.

    industries built around norms

    What is that?

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