Tape Recovery Simulator 96K
bluesnews.com
bluesnews.com
Well that's utter BS. Tape is still a dominant backup form, particularly for archival purposes. The market is big and still growing year on year.
You can't get the same data density and portability out of any other form of backup, and it is a format still under heavy development and refreshes, with LTO-9 due out this year introducing 45TB media at 1GB/s.
The main appeal about 8bit era is that the data quantity is low, and this allows some nice bit level gameplay mechanics.
This works nicely on 13-byte (104 bits) headers, but it won't work on gigabyte(8623489024 bits) files. It hasn't stopped me to joke about it: http://caffeinewithdrawalgames.com/games.html#TRS185Tb
I know for one company in the pharma industry we looked at optical storage and for some uses it was fine, but for the long-term archival aspect in your store and 99.999999% forget about storage backups/archives it just didn't tick enough box's due to being unproven and when you get down to use X and if it fails you can say you did all the right things and if you use something that technically may be better and it fails, your head and massive fines and fallout can ensure much more easily. So tape for many been one of those - it works, why change.
On the other side, it has minute-long seek times since the tape needs to be rewonund/ff (that's an eternity compared to already-deprecated milisecond-long HDD seek times) and it's not suitable for many write cycles (some tapes are even sold as WORM (write once read many), same as the old CD-R drives)
For instance, this is the Discovery Channel's delivery tech specs: https://procurement-notices.undp.org/view_file.cfm?doc_id=12...
From page 27:
"Production partners must deliver graphics masters on LTO-5 data tapes formatted using the Linear Tape File Systems (LTFS). [...] The network will not accept graphics masters on other types of media."
I guess it's hard to wrap your head around data sizes that big. It's pretty impressive when you consider that SATA tops out at 600MB/s, so these tape drives need to hang off of a faster bus.
Though I would love a SATA-one for home use.
Just look at the lto roadmap. They are expecting 480Tb(yes, Tb) tapes https://www.ltoultrium.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/lto-ro... http://vrworld.com/2014/05/05/sonys-new-185-tb-tape-drive-ca...
Unfortunately it's just for the professional market. Looking over some local IT shops, the drives cost around 1500E with 15Tb tapes priced around 80E. I was hoping for a portable tape player able to hold together all the world's music at studio resolution, but that's not going to happen.
Feel these are the details and the vibe that make Zachtronics so successful. They give you an atmosphere, aesthetic and world to be immersed into.
So instead of "Virtual tape player" windows and virtual tapes it should be like an actual tape player on the screen and people are posting you actually tapes you drag into the player and stuff along with written letters etc.
One thing for sure is that it looks interesting.
Another game that blurred the lines that is actually one of my all-time favorites is Papers, Please. This is a game about being an immigration officer, a bureaucrat stamping papers and examining work permits... and it's brilliant and tremendously engaging. It can only exist as an indie game, of course -- imagine EA saying "yes, let's spend money on building and publishing a bureaucrat simulator".
It's another game about bureaucracy. This time you play as an insurance investigator.
There's an article out there about how the 1-bit color rendering works, which I found quite interesting:
https://blog.playstation.com/archive/2019/10/17/lucas-pope-o...
Do note some mysteries have more than one solution. It makes sense, when you think that "who" did "what" to "whom" has more than one possible interpretation, and the game tends to accept most of them as valid!
This is most annoying in (I think) chapter 5, which is where you get some of the more difficult characters to identify, dying deaths that are somewhat ambiguous, involving some of the supernatural aspects of the story, all in scenes that can only be visited by going through other scenes (so it's hard to go back and check them).
As for the other ambiguous situation I mentioned, I found it hilarious in the "guns don't kill people, other people do" sense ;)
At this point I have blind faith in anything Lukas Pope creates.
I feel Factorio also sits right on the edge of this category. You do get to shoot bugs, but in the end, you're really just debugging a giant wafer.
In the end I stoppped playing though. It felt like too much work, and rang too close to my day job. Fortunately, I'm neither an immigrations bureaucrat nor a 19th century insurance investigator, so those themes seem more fascinating to me!
I understand what you mean about the day job thing. I got about 60% of the way through Shenzhen before walking away. Fortunately, I'm not a chip-designer, so hopefully that horizon is farther away with Factorio.
I commend its creators, I just avoid the game now. Who knows, in a couple of years I may get hooked again.
The ultimate experience would be loading an entire program and running it straight out the tape instead of converting wav files back and forth. Sadly the IBM PC tape port is an obscure extension and is totally nonexistent on emulators.
I have a few ideas, one of them being using a sequence to sequence NN. The intuition is that the output domain has a strong structure (C64 basic program tokens) so the decoder can learn to generate valid programs. It looks like it is going to be funnier than this game :)
Funny idea though!
edit: This link doesn't really answer the burning question, which is "How do I play?". After a bit of looking around it seems that as of today, you don't, it doesn't appear to be released yet.