If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵
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@dangeRuss I had some games on tape. It would take lots of time to load a 32kB game
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@fbmac said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
@dangeRuss I had some games on tape. It would take like 30min to load a 32kB game
Which is probably why the guy told me not to press the red button on the keyboard (which I guess was the power button, or reset) and then tried to kick me out when I did.
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@dangeRuss I edited the 30min away, can't trust such old memories. I was like 9 year old at the time
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@dangeRuss said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
onto a
pcAtari
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@dangeRuss I had a little talking robot that ran programs based on cassette tape. But it was mostly audio, with the button presses being a seek IIRC.
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@Luhmann said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
onto a
pcAtariWas that Atari a Personal Computer ?
FileUnder: PC Doesn't mean a computer running Windows
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@dangeRuss said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
I remember when those tapes were used to load games onto a pc using a cassette player..
Does anyone else? Cuz I was a kid and this was in another country and I've never read of any stories of people doing this.
Vic20, Commodore 64, Tandy ColorComputer, etc all used tapes to load/save programs.
Unless you had a bunch of money to buy a floppy.
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@TimeBandit said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
@Luhmann said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
onto a
pcAtariWas that Atari a Personal Computer ?
FileUnder: PC Doesn't mean a computer running Windows
I think that most widespread understanding of the term does understand it as computers that evolved from IBM PC, with the whole ISA architecture enabling expansion and interchangeability.
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Can confirm, am 30, which is
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@Yamikuronue said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
@dangeRuss I had a little talking robot that ran programs based on cassette tape. But it was mostly audio, with the button presses being a seek IIRC.
Thinking of the 2XL? That one actually switched tracks.
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@Onyx said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
I think that most widespread understanding of the term does understand it as computers that evolved from IBM PC, with the whole ISA architecture enabling expansion and interchangeability.
So, next time I want to buy a game, if it says it works on PC, I should be good with my Linux machine, right ?
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@TimeBandit said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
@Onyx said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
I think that most widespread understanding of the term does understand it as computers that evolved from IBM PC, with the whole ISA architecture enabling expansion and interchangeability.
So, next time I want to buy a game, if it says it works on PC, I should be good with my Linux machine, right ?
Yeah, yeah, I know, that classification pisses me off, too.
I'm just saying that (most? did they have a PC clone eventually?) Atari products don't really enter that classification ;)
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@Onyx I don't remember them doing an IBM PC clone.
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@Tsaukpaetra yes! Nice.
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@TimeBandit said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
@Onyx I don't remember them doing an IBM PC clone.
Neither did I, but a quick search turned up the 8086-based PC-1:
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/Atari_PC1_System_s1.jpg
which apparently came with these:
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/Atari_PC1_Diskettes_s1.jpg
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@Luhmann said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
@dangeRuss said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
onto a
pcAtariIn my case it was an MSX like this one:
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Isn't the connection you couldn't afford Maxell?
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@TimeBandit said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
Was that Atari a Personal Computer ?
Not in my memory ... it was connected to the TV and we only played games on it ...
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@TimeBandit said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
I should be good with my Linux machine, right ?
No-one is ever good with Linux hardware.
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@Onyx said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
I think that most widespread understanding of the term does understand it as computers that evolved from IBM PC, with the whole ISA architecture enabling expansion and interchangeability.
You're a real 👴/👵 if you remember when only genuine IBM PCs were called PCs, and all others were called PC-clones.
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@tharpa Wasn't around at the time, but I did use the actual hardware, or at least something close to it, for a considerable amount of time. Does that count?
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Re: Atari:
"Sixteen/Thirty-Two" is a cool name for a computer.
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@aliceif said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
Re: Atari:
"Sixteen/Thirty-Two" is a cool name for a computer.
Sounds like something very confused about its bitness.
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@Lorne-Kates said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
eventually you'll tape over the contents to make a new tape
I don't think I ever actually did that.
Recoiling in horror at the idea of data destruction began at quite an early age for me.
Because tapes are EXPENSIVE.
People like you are the reason so much early Doctor Who has been lost forever.
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@Mikael_Svahnberg said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
I remember that you never bought the 90 minutes tapes because they were more prone to fail. 60min FTW!
Except that you typically couldn't fit both sides of an album on one side of a C60.
C120s were not much good; way too easy to stretch and also suffered from print-through, where the magnetization pattern actually transfers audibly to the next turn of tape on the reel.
I used to prefer BASF's chromium dioxide C90s, which came with little feed-stabilizing guides to help the tape wind neatly. You can see the tip of one of those guides poking into the transparent part of the case on the right hand side of this picture.
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@dangeRuss said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
I remember when those tapes were used to load games onto a pc using a cassette player.
I remember ribbing my TRaSh-80-owning friends about the piss-poor performance of their tape subsystem, which used some bizarre audio modulation scheme that was insanely sensitive to input volume and only managed 250 bits/second.
My Apple II used way, way simpler tape interface hardware, could read and write tapes very reliably, and achieved between 1000 and 2000 bits/s (1-bits occupied twice as much tape as 0-bits).
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@fbmac said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
It would take lots of time to load a 32kB game
My computer in those days wasn't capable of 32kB games (~6kB RAM available for the user, with an optional 16kB expansion pack). But yes, I don't miss the days of putting the tape player on, then going and doing something else for 5 minutes while you waited for your program to load. (And then like as not get a checksum error, which we routinely ignored.)
@tharpa said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
when only genuine IBM PCs were called PCs, and all others were called PC-clones.
Also, having to be very careful about the distinction between "PC-compatible" and "100% PC-compatible".
On the original topic, though - I still have to convert a bunch of my old cassette tapes to MP3s. I've done the ones I most wanted to listen to regularly, but there's still two tape storage units waiting for me to go through them. (And a few boxes of videotapes waiting for a similar treatment*. I really should get onto those sometime.)
* not to MP3 though
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
not to MP3 though
Yeah man, you should use FLAC. You don't want to lose the quality, do you?
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
convert a bunch of my old cassette tapes to MP3s.
Why when you could save the binary data itself and then use a modulator to regenerate the signal?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
@Scarlet_Manuka said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
convert a bunch of my old cassette tapes to MP3s.
Why when you could save the binary data itself and then use a modulator to regenerate the signal?
Pretty sure my cheapo MP3 player would prefer it if I just saved them as MP3s. (These are music tapes I'm talking about... I did previously refer to listening to them, which is not something I generally did with the computer ones, except incidentally while they were loading.)
Also, the converter automatically saves them as MP3s anyway, so all I have to do is split it into tracks and add tags.
@Onyx said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
Yeah man, you should use FLAC. You don't want to lose the quality, do you?
The tape hiss comes through well enough as an MP3, thanks.
Funniest tape quality thing that happened to me was when I picked up a cheap tape that had Sibelius and Bruch violin concertos. The side with the Sibelius concerto had a bit of a pitch waver in it at the beginning (some sort of tape distortion I presume), so I got used to listening to that concerto with a pitch waver at the start and it sounded really odd when I first got a non-defective copy. Since the Bruch concerto was shorter it didn't suffer a similar waver at the end, which was just as well.
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in If you know the answer, you're an 👴/👵:
I got used to listening to that concerto with a pitch waver at the start and it sounded really odd when I first got a non-defective copy
I once got an MP3 version of an album off a friend who'd captured it off some internet stream with a system sound recorder on his mac. During one song, he'd turned up the volume, and the recording had captured the mac volume up sounds. When I actually bought the album later I was always slightly put out when the little pops weren't where I was expecting them