Chris Sievey (better known as his persona Frank Sidebottom) included a whole Sinclair ZX81 "music video" on the B-side of one of his singles. You were supposed to run the program while playing the music from side A.
Even though the program itself was very limited, I think the fact that this was something a band took the time and effort to do back in '84, is pretty cool. Must've been a surreal moment for Dan to see his late fathers easter egg finally run.
I'm curious if any other vinyls have hidden data or messages like this in the runouts.
The runout to Sgt Pepper is preceeded by sound only audible to dogs.
Monty Python released a triple sided record. One of the sides had two grooves. Depending on where you placed the needle, you would hear either side 2 or 3.
The six sides of the three record album 'Sandinista!' had a quote from the movie Alien written in the runout, "IN SPACE ... NO ONE ... CAN ... HEAR ... YOU ... CLASH!"
Not a program, but I remember being oddly satisfied when I noticed it the first or second time I played it.
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!
It's newer, not executable code, and not stored on analog media, but this made me think of the Information Society track "300bps N, 8, 1". It's a recording of a modem. I remember wiring an RJ-11 jack onto some alligator clips to play it into my modem.
Not an easter egg as such, but I came across a BASIC program for the TRS-80 in the early 80's where the programmer had worked out that program lines of various lengths would produce interference of different frequencies when a radio was placed next to it.
Using lines which included long REM statements, and various loops, it would play the William Tell Overture.
For background, the Model 1 TRS-80 had virtually no RF shielding and would interfere with many audio devices next to it, so a radio tuned "off station" was ideal.
Did he use a 90 minute tape? Back in the day I used special 15 minute data tapes for loading programs onto my chosen brand of microcomputer. I found them more reliable than 90 minute audio tapes (can't remember brands used). I'm sort of missing tapes now :-).
The longer the tape the thinner it had to be to fit in the cassette shell. It's been a while now but from memory, 60 minutes or less allowed the full thickness tape, 90 minutes had to be slightly thinner, but still fairly robust. 120 minute tapes did exist but almost every player warned against their use because they snapped very easily.
I was yelling at the screen wondering why he didn't run an 1/8" audio cable from his Audacity direct to the Commodore. The tape was fun maybe but more sources of error.
Yes, but only in the sense that it will threshold any input into a 1-bit signal. If you feed it audio you can use it as a primitive 1-bit sampler. You can even get something that you can play back as recognizable music that way. I haven't tried feeding audio straight in the read pin of the cassette port, but the C64 is so resilient that I'd be surprised if you wouldn't get reasonable results with some minor adjustments.
Still, you would need to cut it up or make an adapter of some sort, then connect that to the 3.5mm audio jack of some smartphone or modern computer. I can see how just copying to a tape may be less fuss.
Edit:
this adapter suggests it is a bit of hassle actually:
That adapter includes pointless leds and attempts to clean up the signal in various ways to make it more reliable. You can likely do without for a one off transfer, at the cost of some hassle getting your audio output right.
The 'simple stupid' approach is to cut off a 3.5mm cable, de-isolate one of the wires and tape it to the read pin. I've done that (just connected random analog signals straight to an io pin with tape) to interface to other ports on the c64. It's incredible what it will tolerate.
But sure, if you have both a cassette player and a datasette to hand, it will definitively be easier.
If the C64 playback head is stereo (or reads one of the L/R tracks and ignores the other), that would likely work. But in this video he mentioned how he suspected that his audio tape deck failed him (it definitely records in stereo) while the data recorder that ultimately worked might be mono (in which case it might record a single track, twice as wide). Magnetic tape doesn't inherently have tracks until you lay some down with a record head.
When transferring from the jack output of my PC to a CPC-464,
I use a "cassette jack adapter" that I bought second-hand for 1€.
Faster and more reliable that going through a cassette.
Even when transferring to a machine fitted with a disk drive (e.g. a CPC-6128) the audio cable option has the benefit of no moving part (no swapping disks, etc) and is thus faster than using a PC to write to a floppy disk to be read by the CPC. I use this cable: https://coolnovelties.co.uk/coolnovelties/amstrad-cpc-pcw/27... .
SD card readers exist for the CPC, and other ways to inject data from the PC, but nothing beats a 1-10€ adapter/cable, simplicity and cost-wise.
https://youtu.be/8u9ZyV-BHFA