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In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

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Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#111

Post by drivers99 »

pknerd wrote: post #64

My brain is unable to grasp it..How does it work and at what speed things used to get downloaded?

This series of videos walks through building a circuit to decode one type of audio data format that was used in the 80s and send data to a computer and discusses how the audio signal works and simple circuit to turn it into digital data https://www.gregorystrike.com/2023/01/07/kansas-city-standar...

(I just got another one of these kits because I had previously built, successfully tested, then threw it out after I had some issues using it as-is, but I want to build it again with the additional electronics experience I have now.)

Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#113

Post by nsenifty »

coreyh14444 wrote: post #11

I definitely had cassette based games on the TRS-80, but most of the "wireless" transmission in my youth was via BASIC printed in the back of computer magazines. You had to type in the entire app yourself. I did this for basically every app they listed. Sometimes it was like tax prep software, but I didn't care, even though I was like 9 at the time. Yes, it took a very long time. Yes, you could easily introduce typos…

There was something magical starting to type a listing that started with `10 GOSUB 10000`.

Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#114

Post by ako »

jonwinstanley wrote: post #70
mysterydip wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the typos were in the magazine itself, and you wouldn't figure out the problem with the code you triple-checked you typed in properly until the errata in next month's issue :)

The compiler/interpreter couldn’t even tell you what line the error was on! You’d just get a big error message for the whole program.

For the zx81 i think it was usually some encoded binary form, so no compiler/interpreter involved.

Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#115

Post by jandrese »

ztetranz wrote: post #107
section_me wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post man always bent our magazine and pushed it in the cat flap making the included disk useless (even though it was clearly marked "DO NOT BEND!"), so I remember having to type everything out and sometimes correct the typos introduced into the print version. Fun times.

Floppy disks DO NOT BEND! Oh yes they do.

At least the 5 1/4 disks did. 3 1/2 disks did not like it at all. As long as you didn't crease anything the 5 1/4s would usually still work. The data wasn't especially dense on those (if you could see magnetic fields the patches would have been large enough to be visible to the naked eye) so the could take some abuse. At least until the magnetic coating started flaking off.

Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#116

Post by cobbaut »

nunez wrote: post #77

Insane that there are people denying that this happened. I wasn't born during this period, but being able to download stuff off of terrestrial radio is completely believable. What do people think Wi-Fi or cellular networks are???

I was alive, and it did happen.

I never did it myself, but did get copies of the (British I think) broadcasts on cassette for the ZX Spectrum. iirc a program would be about five-six minutes of beeps.

Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#117

Post by tantalor »

aaronbaugher wrote: post #101
jonwinstanley wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The compiler/interpreter couldn’t even tell you what line the error was on! You’d just get a big error message for the whole program.

After a while, magazines like Commodore Run and Compute started including a short program that would checksum each line as you entered it, so you could check that against a checksum in the magazine. Of course, you had to get that program typed in correctly first before you could use it to enter others.

I'm curious, can you say more about "as you entered it"?

Do you mean like, "for lines 1-20 the checksum should be 0xDEADBEEF"? This would let you find the error before finishing the program.

Or just at the end, it would checksum the whole thing?

Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#118

Post by jandrese »

nacnud wrote: post #86
buildsjets wrote: post #84

There are websites with WAV files of software cassettes. You can connect the audio out of your cellphone to the cassette input of your Apple ][ and load audio directly from the web. https://asciiexpress.net/gameserver/readme.html

Ah, the retro equivalent of "curl -L | bash" ... :)

Yep. But of course security was not a concern with the machines of the era. At all. There wasn't even the concept beyond locking the entire computer away in a cabinet. For the most part a virus couldn't hurt your machine or survive a power off, although there are a few machines of the era with buggy "killer registers" that you could set that would cause a malfunction serious enough that could burn out some part of the machine.

Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#119

Post by jandrese »

thiagoharry wrote: post #38

In Brazil, during the 80s there was a service called "telegame". A user could use an Atari 2600 cartridge connected to a modem to download games from a catalogue of 150 diferente games.

I bet that worked pretty well considering an Atari 2600 cart is 4kb. Even over a 300 baud modem with all of the encoding overhead that's about 20 seconds to download the whole thing.

Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#120

Post by Projectiboga »

coreyh14444 wrote: post #11

I definitely had cassette based games on the TRS-80, but most of the "wireless" transmission in my youth was via BASIC printed in the back of computer magazines. You had to type in the entire app yourself. I did this for basically every app they listed. Sometimes it was like tax prep software, but I didn't care, even though I was like 9 at the time. Yes, it took a very long time. Yes, you could easily introduce typos…

I typed out a blood alcohol calculator in BASIC on my Apple clone around 85 or 86, body weight, amount of drinks and it charted out BAC over time. It was interesting to see the variations between a number a drinks and timing. Don't recall if it was BYTE or some other source.
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