Did anyone ever try loading a cassette game over a landline phone?

[Retro1234]

Did anyone ever actually try this. Perhaps from a friend's house or something.
Be interested to here if anyone did.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Did anyone ever actually try this. Perhaps from a friend's house or something.

Be interested to here if anyone did.

Ha! What a crazy idea

[Retro1234]

I think it's something I always thought about doing as a kid but really you would need an adapter, possibly an old answer phone could of had a input and output.

[saimon69]

well more or less is like modem works, but in the loading routines of a tape there is no error correction

[lilwshu]

I didn't try phone lines but I was watching old episodes of Making the Most of the Micro on Youtube recently and tried loading the "telesoftware" broadcast at the end on my BBC Micro via the tape interface.

( [ Show youtube player ])

To my surprise considering the quality of the recording and the Youtube compression it worked without issue.

[hitm4n]

I recorded a TV program once that had the loading noise for a program on it (a very small one), then copied it to a cassette and loaded it on a speccy. I don't remember what it was but it did work. If i recall it was also rubbish and i never tried it again realising that for anything worthwhile they'd have to be playing that noise for more time than a tv program allowed. So... not a phone, but done via TV. Equally as odd i think.

[Retro1234]

Originally Posted by lilwshu

I didn't try phone lines but I was watching old episodes of Making the Most of the Micro on Youtube recently and tried loading the "telesoftware" broadcast at the end on my BBC Micro via the tape interface.

( [ Show youtube player ])

To my surprise considering the quality of the recording and the Youtube compression it worked without issue.

Wow that is a surprise.

Originally Posted by hitm4n

I recorded a TV program once that had the loading noise for a program on it (a very small one), then copied it to a cassette and loaded it on a speccy. I don't remember what it was but it did work. If i recall it was also rubbish and i never tried it again realising that for anything worthwhile they'd have to be playing that noise for more time than a tv program allowed. So... not a phone, but done via TV. Equally as odd i think.

I wonder what the program was called.

[dreadnought]

In Poland (and other countries) there were regular radio programs which broadcast software. I've tried saving and then loading them couple of times and failed totally. But it probably had had more to do with the fact radio & deck I was using back then were really poor. Guess it must have worked for some people, otherwise they wouldn't bother broadcasting.

[Korban]

No, but I did make screechy noises into a microphone with my voice when I was very young to try to get my Tandy coco to Find something (coco users will probably understand better than most what I mean, but I'd imagine most will get the gist).
Wasn't often that anything would happen, but every now and again it'd try loading something for a fraction of a second.
Was almost as much fun as half the Coco game library. Me and a particular friend spent a bit of time trying.
I was barely into adolescents though, and doing weird things is nigh on a right of passage.

[hitm4n]

In case anyone is curious, i found this...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum_software
See the "Media" section then the "Others" part beneath.

This was a very long time ago, close to 40 years (1982/1983), so memory is hazy. Maybe it was a radio show i recorded it from, some late night computer broadcast maybe, or it could have been during a "broadcast for schools" thing on tv. These were usually airing up to midnight on BBC2 i think, at leats in the early 80's. Teachers would record these and play them in the classroom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeli...asts_in_the_UK

It would be cool to find it again.

And another interesting chat around this topic
https://www.sinclairzxworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=4240

[Bruce Abbott]

In the 1980's there was an English computer magazine - can't remember the name - which had a phone number you could download programs from (a different program each month). I had a ZX Spectrum with no serial port or MODEM, but I figured that I could write a program to decode the tones. Toll calls from New Zealand cost about $10 a minute, and I knew it would take several goes to get it right, so I recorded the audio on cassette tape for later playback.

After several days working on it I finally managed to get the decoding algorithm working properly - then discovered the program I had downloaded was for the C64! I had forgotten that magazines took 3 months to get to New Zealand, so of course by the time I read it they had changed the download.

[Mr Creosote]

Originally Posted by hitm4n

I recorded a TV program once that had the loading noise for a program on it (a very small one), then copied it to a cassette and loaded it on a speccy. I don't remember what it was but it did work. If i recall it was also rubbish and i never tried it again realising that for anything worthwhile they'd have to be playing that noise for more time than a tv program allowed. So... not a phone, but done via TV. Equally as odd i think.

Yes, they did that on German TV as well. I remember sitting in front of the TV, holding a microphone, hoping for the best… and then my brother entered the room. Never got the programme to run

[andyhants]

I recorded what I believe was the first ever broadcast computer programme - during an episode of Tomorrow's World on BBC1 one evening in 1981 or 82 for my ZX81. I plugged our cassette recorder into the headphone socket of my 12" B&W TV to record it. After fiddling with the volume levels a bit to play it back to load it into the ZX81 unbelievably it actually worked.

As i recall it asked you to type in your name & then it had a simple message printed on the screen - something like "Well done Andy it worked - from Michael, Judith ..etc Tomorrows World"

[Retro1234]

Originally Posted by andyhants

I recorded what I believe was the first ever broadcast computer programme - during an episode of Tomorrow's World on BBC1 one evening in 1981 or 82 for my ZX81. I plugged our cassette recorder into the headphone socket of my 12" B&W TV to record it. After fiddling with the volume levels a bit to play it back to load it into the ZX81 unbelievably it actually worked.

As i recall it asked you to type in your name & then it had a simple message printed on the screen - something like "Well done Andy it worked - from Michael, Judith ..etc Tomorrows World"

Cool - Tomorrows world was great.


hehe I guess this is it https://m.facebook.com/watch/?v=428025227875799&_rdr

[Cubemon]

Phones were always "optimized" for speech on the frequency range, so probably loading a tape signal through a phone wouldn't have worked, as the frequency band would have been narrower.

Or at least, it would be on a different frequency range; phones usually dropped low frequencies, where as c-cassettes usually lost the high end. Especially on older, more used tapes.

Of course that's just my understanding as a sound engineer, I haven't actually measured and compared any signals.

If someone has some hard data on the subject, it'd be much appreciated!

[Retro1234]

Seems there was an ITV show called Database? don't remember it. They broadcast a computer program at the end
[ Show youtube player ]

Originally Posted by Cubemon

Phones were always "optimized" for speech on the frequency range, so probably loading a tape signal through a phone wouldn't have worked, as the frequency band would have been narrower.

Or at least, it would be on a different frequency range; phones usually dropped low frequencies, where as c-cassettes usually lost the high end. Especially on older, more used tapes.

Of course that's just my understanding as a sound engineer, I haven't actually measured and compared any signals.

If someone has some hard data on the subject, it'd be much appreciated!

I assume it would work - like saimon69 wrote just like a basic modem.

[Cubemon]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

I assume it would work - like saimon69 wrote just like a basic modem.

Well, again, not knowing the technical details, I'd still assume the encoding/modulation for phone lines would be different compared to what they did for tapes. The original signals are both able to travel as "analog sound" for both, but the medium for the signal is significantly different.

[saimon69]

At this point someone should call themselves on the landline phone and play an mp3 of a tap file while the speccy is listening in load mode and see what will happen...

[Cubemon]

Actually, there's nothing (except annoying tinkering and poking around) stopping from trying this over a modern cell phone call! I'd expect a modern 4G (or even 5G for the better-off retro hackers) call to be as good quality, or maybe even better, as landline phones back in the day.

If that works, we can employ Look Mom No Computer on Youtube to test how the old telephone hardware handles things!

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Cubemon

Well, again, not knowing the technical details, I'd still assume the encoding/modulation for phone lines would be different compared to what they did for tapes. The original signals are both able to travel as "analog sound" for both, but the medium for the signal is significantly different.

There was no 'encoding' back then, just plain old analogue possibly digitized into 8 bit PCM for long distance transmission. But the bandwidth was limited from 300Hz to ~3.5kHz and not phase corrected, so a 'tape' signal could get badly distorted. Mind you a lot of tape players weren't that great either.

Some computers had good input circuitry and software that could handle high distortion, others didn't. The ZX Spectrum was excellent - but it didn't have any error correction. Some like the C64 and Atari had dedicated tape machines that were 'optimized' for the job. Atari's was very bad though - it used a high frequency tone that suffered from dropouts and head misalignment. Many others were just bad.