Spin machines: the curious history of video games on vinyl
July 9, 2021 5:56 AM Subscribe
turns out these games are actually old Aphex Twin tunes loaded as data
posted by glonous keming at 7:08 AM on July 9, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by glonous keming at 7:08 AM on July 9, 2021 [2 favorites]
This makes me think of Information Society's "300bps N,8,1" track, which was one side of a modem conversation. Put your acoustic coupler up to your speakers and you (slowly) get a story about the band being stranded in Brazil and held hostage by their promoter (I think ... it's been a long time!).
posted by introp at 7:21 AM on July 9, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by introp at 7:21 AM on July 9, 2021 [3 favorites]
This makes me think of Information Society's "300bps N,8,1" track
Oh my god, I forgot about this, and now I'm tripping the fuck out right down memory lane. Thank you!
Also it's super weird that I can still readily confirm that it is a 300 BPS signal by ear and not a 1200 or 2400. I don't think I've heard a 300 BPS carrier tone in something like over 20 years. I mean it's been at least 20 years, if not maybe 25-30 years.
My first modems were 75 and 300 baud, and then at some point in the late 80s my step-dad gave me an industrial or commercial grade Racal-Vadic "network modem" rated for 28.8k in an era when 9600 BPS modems still had a list price of about 1000 USD, and 2400 BPS modems were still several hundred dollars and considered fast.
That modem was totally l33t. I remember it had some extra handshake features of some kind and it would often get Hayes or Rockwell chipset modems branded as 9600 BPS max speeds to upgrade the connection to 14.4k or higher, including odd-numbered or non-standard speeds.
More than once I was dialed into a BBS and I had a SysOp break into a local chat connection with some real concern and alarm wondering exactly how in the hell I was connected at speeds higher than their fastest modem in their pool.
I still have no idea how that worked, but in hindsight it was probably one of those common tech things where a chipset or device - in this case the consumer grade modems being used for BBS dial up pools - was artificially limited for marketing and compatibility purposes, but woke up hidden features when connected to my commercial/network rated modem that had the right handshake and initialization tones.
It only seemed to work with certain genuine Hayes or Rockwell chipset external modems with a proper full featured UART chip. I think I may have last used that modem as late as 1994 or so or so because it was more than fast enough for BBSes, Usenet and a SLIP or shell dialup account and very early web browsing, and it was compatible with basically anything with a real serial port and UART.
posted by loquacious at 10:08 AM on July 9, 2021 [10 favorites]
Oh my god, I forgot about this, and now I'm tripping the fuck out right down memory lane. Thank you!
Also it's super weird that I can still readily confirm that it is a 300 BPS signal by ear and not a 1200 or 2400. I don't think I've heard a 300 BPS carrier tone in something like over 20 years. I mean it's been at least 20 years, if not maybe 25-30 years.
My first modems were 75 and 300 baud, and then at some point in the late 80s my step-dad gave me an industrial or commercial grade Racal-Vadic "network modem" rated for 28.8k in an era when 9600 BPS modems still had a list price of about 1000 USD, and 2400 BPS modems were still several hundred dollars and considered fast.
That modem was totally l33t. I remember it had some extra handshake features of some kind and it would often get Hayes or Rockwell chipset modems branded as 9600 BPS max speeds to upgrade the connection to 14.4k or higher, including odd-numbered or non-standard speeds.
More than once I was dialed into a BBS and I had a SysOp break into a local chat connection with some real concern and alarm wondering exactly how in the hell I was connected at speeds higher than their fastest modem in their pool.
I still have no idea how that worked, but in hindsight it was probably one of those common tech things where a chipset or device - in this case the consumer grade modems being used for BBS dial up pools - was artificially limited for marketing and compatibility purposes, but woke up hidden features when connected to my commercial/network rated modem that had the right handshake and initialization tones.
It only seemed to work with certain genuine Hayes or Rockwell chipset external modems with a proper full featured UART chip. I think I may have last used that modem as late as 1994 or so or so because it was more than fast enough for BBSes, Usenet and a SLIP or shell dialup account and very early web browsing, and it was compatible with basically anything with a real serial port and UART.
posted by loquacious at 10:08 AM on July 9, 2021 [10 favorites]
I've always been fascinated by equipment from this era because I first experienced it as broken or semi-working cast offs as a kid. I had a nonfunctioning TI-994a that I used to play pretend with and I'd put it across my lap and randomly punch the keyboard with my fingertips. I also had the associated TI cassette player which worked and was mine to play audio cassettes on. I think the for lead cable to connect the two devices was kicking around for a while before it got thrown out, and I always wondered what it did.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:34 AM on July 9, 2021
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:34 AM on July 9, 2021
I had a Sinclair Spectrum. I didn't know about Chris Sievey's hand-synchronized computer musical video 'Camouflage', or I would have tried to get my hands on it. Very cool!
Looking at the Wikipedia page for Chris, he's a fascinating person who's done a lot of very diverse things in his career.
posted by eye of newt at 10:43 AM on July 9, 2021
Looking at the Wikipedia page for Chris, he's a fascinating person who's done a lot of very diverse things in his career.
posted by eye of newt at 10:43 AM on July 9, 2021
I've always been fascinated by equipment from this era because I first experienced it as broken or semi-working cast offs as a kid. I had a nonfunctioning TI-994a that I used to play pretend with and I'd put it across my lap and randomly punch the keyboard with my fingertips.
Yeah, I definitely had some weird and broken gear that I used to play with like this as a kid. My family was basically just about on poverty line for most of my life. We did have a second hand Franklin Ace (Apple IIe clone) that my mom saved up for to be able to use it for writing, but we didn't get a color screen computer or PC at home until maybe the early 90s.
At some point someone gave me one of those Heathkit microprocessor boards that had a numeric keypad and an LED segmented read out and I had no idea what to do with it because you basically had to talk to it in hex and low level so I just randomly punched in things and would see what happened.
And then for some reason I tried probing the circuits with an old pair of headphones with bare leads and discovered it made cool noises and this is probably why I still like Aphex Twin today.
And during my BBS days most of my dial-up time was done on a very old school portable CP/M computer made by Sharp that I saved up for. It was a lot like the TRS-80 100 or 200 portables from Radio Shack. No discs, no tapes, just a built in modem and a terminal/dialup program. And, eventually, the network modem mentioned above strapped to the lid with velcro and plugged into the built in RS-232 serial port, and I used that well into the early 1990s because it was so portable and durable.
This is totally weird but I don't think I even actually owned my first real computer with a floppy disk or HDD or so much as a color screen until the mid 1990s, and it was a total junker hand-me down I put together out of spare and unwanted parts.
posted by loquacious at 12:23 PM on July 9, 2021
Yeah, I definitely had some weird and broken gear that I used to play with like this as a kid. My family was basically just about on poverty line for most of my life. We did have a second hand Franklin Ace (Apple IIe clone) that my mom saved up for to be able to use it for writing, but we didn't get a color screen computer or PC at home until maybe the early 90s.
At some point someone gave me one of those Heathkit microprocessor boards that had a numeric keypad and an LED segmented read out and I had no idea what to do with it because you basically had to talk to it in hex and low level so I just randomly punched in things and would see what happened.
And then for some reason I tried probing the circuits with an old pair of headphones with bare leads and discovered it made cool noises and this is probably why I still like Aphex Twin today.
And during my BBS days most of my dial-up time was done on a very old school portable CP/M computer made by Sharp that I saved up for. It was a lot like the TRS-80 100 or 200 portables from Radio Shack. No discs, no tapes, just a built in modem and a terminal/dialup program. And, eventually, the network modem mentioned above strapped to the lid with velcro and plugged into the built in RS-232 serial port, and I used that well into the early 1990s because it was so portable and durable.
This is totally weird but I don't think I even actually owned my first real computer with a floppy disk or HDD or so much as a color screen until the mid 1990s, and it was a total junker hand-me down I put together out of spare and unwanted parts.
posted by loquacious at 12:23 PM on July 9, 2021
Data as audio seemed fundamental at the time, but now it just seems weird. It's amazing that it worked at all: the formats had to be self-clocking, as you couldn't guarantee tape speeds to be accurate. They also had to survive incorrect polarity, as a tape recorder could be powered any old how.
I was reading recently about the whole BBC Micro development program. Acorn wanted to go with a machine with as little difference from their prototypes, but BBC Engineering stuck their oar in and demanded some very non-mainstream changes. One that didn't make it to the production machines was the requirement for a very (electrically) quiet linear power supply for to ensure broadcast-quality video output, but one that did (apparently) was that official BBC Micro software tapes weren't mastered from the same type of computer, but used a high-spec audio circuit. The BBC didn't want any old crap audio in their data.
posted by scruss at 2:25 PM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
I was reading recently about the whole BBC Micro development program. Acorn wanted to go with a machine with as little difference from their prototypes, but BBC Engineering stuck their oar in and demanded some very non-mainstream changes. One that didn't make it to the production machines was the requirement for a very (electrically) quiet linear power supply for to ensure broadcast-quality video output, but one that did (apparently) was that official BBC Micro software tapes weren't mastered from the same type of computer, but used a high-spec audio circuit. The BBC didn't want any old crap audio in their data.
posted by scruss at 2:25 PM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
I kind of geek out on this, because the humble (yet endangered) headphone jack is one of the last remaining interfaces to vintage home computers, at least without custom hardware. You can fling games to your Apple ][, beam them into your Atari 2600, or upgrade your Data East arcade system. You can even load cross-platform BASIC programs over the airwaves.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 2:48 PM on July 9, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 2:48 PM on July 9, 2021 [2 favorites]
I was one of the kids subscribing to computer magazines and typing in pages of BASIC code and saving the programs to cassette. Never got any flexidisk programs but I do have a Joy Division flexidisk that is pretty neat.
posted by ShakeyJake at 3:31 PM on July 9, 2021
posted by ShakeyJake at 3:31 PM on July 9, 2021
It was a lot like the TRS-80 100 or 200 portables from Radio Shack. No discs, no tapes, just a built in modem and a terminal/dialup program.
We had a bunch of those in my elementary school and if we had finished all of our assignments during the part of the day where the teacher had broken the class out into smaller reading groups, we could sit at one and type whatever we felt like.
I remember there was one laptop that had a file saved on it and when you opened it, music played. Presumably it was the work of some older kid in one of the upper grades, but to this day I've always wondered how that was done. Did the built-in modem have a dialer and the notes were DTMF tones? Was it the system speaker? Was the word processor capable of executing code when displaying a document?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:10 AM on July 10, 2021
We had a bunch of those in my elementary school and if we had finished all of our assignments during the part of the day where the teacher had broken the class out into smaller reading groups, we could sit at one and type whatever we felt like.
I remember there was one laptop that had a file saved on it and when you opened it, music played. Presumably it was the work of some older kid in one of the upper grades, but to this day I've always wondered how that was done. Did the built-in modem have a dialer and the notes were DTMF tones? Was it the system speaker? Was the word processor capable of executing code when displaying a document?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:10 AM on July 10, 2021
I remember there was one laptop that had a file saved on it and when you opened it, music played. Presumably it was the work of some older kid in one of the upper grades, but to this day I've always wondered how that was done.
These CP/M and ROM based computers did usually have a piezo buzzer in them, and there was a text based ASCII or ANSI control code to make them beep. You could even send command as text over a modem in, say, a text based BBS game or in direct chat connections.
I remember playing a version of Tetris online as a "door game" that was a bunch of ANSI graphics wizardry that used direct cursor control codes to do screen and graphics rewrites, but you needed a pretty fast modem to play them at all otherwise it could take multiple seconds to update the screen.
Most of the BASIC interpreters also had a beep function which could usually be modulated in length or frequency by using the right numbers, usually noted in milliseconds. This was usually the "easiest" way of getting a BASIC program or game to make sounds or music without resorting to low level assembly programming.
Which is pretty wild to think about, because there were some games in BASIC that had some fairly complicated sound programming going on. For simple music this meant manually programming notes and tone duration with little more than calling out the frequency and note length directly to get, say, Fur Elise or Greensleeves or whatever, without any aid of a sound designer. It took a lot of trial and error and didn't always translate well across different computers because it often relied on the type and kind of piezo buzzer but also the clock speed of the computer.
To get complicated noises like a buzz or clicking noise often meant programming a series of extremely short pulses in rapid-fire succession not unlike a really primitive pulse code modulation. I remember some BASIC games that even managed to get very crude speech-like sounds out of this technique.
I have no idea how they would get it to load that file or program every time you turned it on, though. As far as I know there wasn't some kind of startup flag or folder, but I never owned one of these kinds of computers that had a BASIC emulator built in, so maybe the TRS-80 versions had a way to flag a program to be launched on boot.
These early CP/M based portables are rather fascinating because of how simple they were. They generally used either the Intel 8085 or 8085C processors, or the Zilog Z80. The 8085 was basically the 8080 redesigned to use only 5 volts DC instead of requiring both 5 and 12 volts and some changes to the way the data bus worked.
They weren't really much more complicated than a cheap desktop calculator with some ROM software built into it and a tiny bit of built in battery backed RAM. No moving parts. No discs, though some models did have a peripheral bus to use with a floppy disc drive. Almost all of them had a cassette tape option, which shared functionality with the modem because it was basically the same system. No backlight. Just a very plain dot matrix passive LCD display.
I used to haul mine around all the time because it ran off of just 4 C sized batteries and could last up to a week or so on a good set of alkaline batteries, and with the built in modem I could dial up BBSes from wherever I could find a phone line and a dial tone. I usually carried around a portable acoustic coupler, an RJ-11 phone cable and then an RJ-11 cable that had alligator clips on the other end.
At some point I even had a miniaturized "phone" that was smaller than a pager I got from an electronics flea market somewhere that was a complete POTS telephone with a built in microphone and a plain 3.5 mm headphone jack, and had two RJ-11 jacks for passthrough connections to, say, my built in modem. I often used it to check for dial tones, manually dialing a BBS or even placing free voice calls.
I used the cable with alligator clips to be able to clip in to telephone punch down boards at places like the service tunnels behind stores in the mall, particularly behind a number of Radio Shack locations where they usually had dedicated lines for testing FAX machines and were almost always helpfully tagged and marked as such.
It was wild. The adults had no idea what I was doing, even when I was borrowing a dial tone at high school from some random and unprotected phone jack, and these were all over the place in locations like the library, random storage rooms, classrooms and even hallways or common areas.
In hindsight I have no idea how I was never confronted or asked just what in the hell did I think I was doing with my portable computer and clandestine phone phreaker's accessory kit, because I was certainly not up to anything good.
Which was usually trying to figure out where the party was at that day, where we were going to hang out and if we were going to go get stoned or go robotripping or otherwise ditch school.
I remember more than one encounter involving teachers or admins at my school where I thought for sure I was going to get busted.
One that stands out in particular was I was waiting to talk to a guidance councilor because I was in trouble for attendance from ditching too much and/or grades or something, and I found an unused RS-232 cable under the chairs in the reception lobby and had it plugged in to my laptop.
Turns out it was an active serial X.25 network cable used for terminals to access their totally unprotected database server or mainframe. All I had to do to access it was launch my terminal program and set the connection type to the right values and I was presented with access to everything. I was even able to pull up my own records and grades and even edit them if I wanted to, but I didn't.
And I did this in full view of anyone walking by with a receptionist sitting right there watching me. I even had the school principal walk by and have a brief chat with me while I sat there with my little laptop in my lap and that totally obvious and huge full sized serial cable snaking out of my laptop down under the chairs. I was literally in the school's database poking at it while the principal was talking at me about something and he was totally oblivious to any of it.
In hindsight I could have changed the records for any student or file in the entire district, which would have had a student body of tens of thousands at the time. Looking back I kind of wish I went for it and changed all of my grades to straight As (or Fs) just to see what happened.
I could have walked into that guidance councilor's office and said something like "What do you mean bad grades? I have straight As! Check your computer!" just to watch their confusion.
posted by loquacious at 1:30 PM on July 10, 2021 [4 favorites]
These CP/M and ROM based computers did usually have a piezo buzzer in them, and there was a text based ASCII or ANSI control code to make them beep. You could even send command as text over a modem in, say, a text based BBS game or in direct chat connections.
I remember playing a version of Tetris online as a "door game" that was a bunch of ANSI graphics wizardry that used direct cursor control codes to do screen and graphics rewrites, but you needed a pretty fast modem to play them at all otherwise it could take multiple seconds to update the screen.
Most of the BASIC interpreters also had a beep function which could usually be modulated in length or frequency by using the right numbers, usually noted in milliseconds. This was usually the "easiest" way of getting a BASIC program or game to make sounds or music without resorting to low level assembly programming.
Which is pretty wild to think about, because there were some games in BASIC that had some fairly complicated sound programming going on. For simple music this meant manually programming notes and tone duration with little more than calling out the frequency and note length directly to get, say, Fur Elise or Greensleeves or whatever, without any aid of a sound designer. It took a lot of trial and error and didn't always translate well across different computers because it often relied on the type and kind of piezo buzzer but also the clock speed of the computer.
To get complicated noises like a buzz or clicking noise often meant programming a series of extremely short pulses in rapid-fire succession not unlike a really primitive pulse code modulation. I remember some BASIC games that even managed to get very crude speech-like sounds out of this technique.
I have no idea how they would get it to load that file or program every time you turned it on, though. As far as I know there wasn't some kind of startup flag or folder, but I never owned one of these kinds of computers that had a BASIC emulator built in, so maybe the TRS-80 versions had a way to flag a program to be launched on boot.
These early CP/M based portables are rather fascinating because of how simple they were. They generally used either the Intel 8085 or 8085C processors, or the Zilog Z80. The 8085 was basically the 8080 redesigned to use only 5 volts DC instead of requiring both 5 and 12 volts and some changes to the way the data bus worked.
They weren't really much more complicated than a cheap desktop calculator with some ROM software built into it and a tiny bit of built in battery backed RAM. No moving parts. No discs, though some models did have a peripheral bus to use with a floppy disc drive. Almost all of them had a cassette tape option, which shared functionality with the modem because it was basically the same system. No backlight. Just a very plain dot matrix passive LCD display.
I used to haul mine around all the time because it ran off of just 4 C sized batteries and could last up to a week or so on a good set of alkaline batteries, and with the built in modem I could dial up BBSes from wherever I could find a phone line and a dial tone. I usually carried around a portable acoustic coupler, an RJ-11 phone cable and then an RJ-11 cable that had alligator clips on the other end.
At some point I even had a miniaturized "phone" that was smaller than a pager I got from an electronics flea market somewhere that was a complete POTS telephone with a built in microphone and a plain 3.5 mm headphone jack, and had two RJ-11 jacks for passthrough connections to, say, my built in modem. I often used it to check for dial tones, manually dialing a BBS or even placing free voice calls.
I used the cable with alligator clips to be able to clip in to telephone punch down boards at places like the service tunnels behind stores in the mall, particularly behind a number of Radio Shack locations where they usually had dedicated lines for testing FAX machines and were almost always helpfully tagged and marked as such.
It was wild. The adults had no idea what I was doing, even when I was borrowing a dial tone at high school from some random and unprotected phone jack, and these were all over the place in locations like the library, random storage rooms, classrooms and even hallways or common areas.
In hindsight I have no idea how I was never confronted or asked just what in the hell did I think I was doing with my portable computer and clandestine phone phreaker's accessory kit, because I was certainly not up to anything good.
Which was usually trying to figure out where the party was at that day, where we were going to hang out and if we were going to go get stoned or go robotripping or otherwise ditch school.
I remember more than one encounter involving teachers or admins at my school where I thought for sure I was going to get busted.
One that stands out in particular was I was waiting to talk to a guidance councilor because I was in trouble for attendance from ditching too much and/or grades or something, and I found an unused RS-232 cable under the chairs in the reception lobby and had it plugged in to my laptop.
Turns out it was an active serial X.25 network cable used for terminals to access their totally unprotected database server or mainframe. All I had to do to access it was launch my terminal program and set the connection type to the right values and I was presented with access to everything. I was even able to pull up my own records and grades and even edit them if I wanted to, but I didn't.
And I did this in full view of anyone walking by with a receptionist sitting right there watching me. I even had the school principal walk by and have a brief chat with me while I sat there with my little laptop in my lap and that totally obvious and huge full sized serial cable snaking out of my laptop down under the chairs. I was literally in the school's database poking at it while the principal was talking at me about something and he was totally oblivious to any of it.
In hindsight I could have changed the records for any student or file in the entire district, which would have had a student body of tens of thousands at the time. Looking back I kind of wish I went for it and changed all of my grades to straight As (or Fs) just to see what happened.
I could have walked into that guidance councilor's office and said something like "What do you mean bad grades? I have straight As! Check your computer!" just to watch their confusion.
posted by loquacious at 1:30 PM on July 10, 2021 [4 favorites]
→
Thankfully, the custom hardware is a $2 XY-BT-Mini board, which gives you in effect a Bluetooth headphone jack
posted by scruss at 7:42 AM on July 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
the humble (yet endangered) headphone jack is one of the last remaining interfaces to vintage home computers, at least without custom hardware
Thankfully, the custom hardware is a $2 XY-BT-Mini board, which gives you in effect a Bluetooth headphone jack
posted by scruss at 7:42 AM on July 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
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posted by GenjiandProust at 6:31 AM on July 9, 2021 [4 favorites]