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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit before my time, and tape based games never really caught on in the US as far as I'm aware, but I've always been kind of fascinated by storing programs in audio.

There's something bizarrely cool about the idea of taking something designed for an analog medium and using it for something sort of definitionally not analog. It was traditionally cassette tapes, but I saw a YouTube video where some companies distributed games on CDs, and there's something kind of weird and anachronistic about being able to play a ZX Spectrum game off a CD; the program is going from Digital (being written) -> analog (converted to audio signals) -> digital (put on a CD) -> analog (back to audio) -> digital (read by the computer). People can be pretty clever sometimes.

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Dialup modem did the same thing but with more efficient protocol and error control via a network stack. ADSL also took a step further and used the shielding on copper cables to attain higher (inaudible) frequencies. The tech in some form is still about this is just the granddaddy version :D

Yeah, I knew all that actually, but I guess I just associate dialup with the next generation of computers. Fundamentally I know it's a very similar tech to the tape-based game distribution, but for some reason it's categorized differently in my brain.

ADSL does not depend on shielding of copper. It uses Discrete Multi Tone modulation which modulates many subcarriers to be able to compensate for channel distortion as the characteristics of each phone line are rather different in the frequency domain. This same technology underlies many modern wireless protocols as well.

That might have been my misunderstanding. I had a (PhD) friend doing research for BT in the mid 90s in DSL technology (which hadn't been invented then, it was ISDN only) at Lancaster University UK, and he told me it was using shielding. Perhaps I've got it confused with a competing technology he was looking at at the time.

The PS1 used CDs. Many games could be dropped into a cd player, and if you skip the first track (the data track), the rest of the game's music/audio could be played.

It was possible to do the same with some PC games! I have fond memories of listening to the soundtracks of Driver, and Knights and Merchants, on my little stereo.

Cassette tapes for Atari 800XL used just a single channel for data. The other one could have music and you would listen to it during game loading.

Yeah, X-Wing vs Tie Fighter had a lot of the popular Star Wars music in redbook audio so it would work fine in a CD player, a fact that I was super excited to find out when I was a kid playing with my action figures.

Both the CD and the ZX Spectrum came out in 1982

If you had a CD playing device at home by 1982, it would be like having an 8K 60" TV today.

Or, as a better match, a high end VR device able to push 4k games to each eye at 120FPS.

Everyone and his grandma used tapes/cassetes until mid 90's.

Yeah, I was about to respond with something like this. I knew that CDs came out in the early 80's, but I still more or less associate them with the 90's; it wasn't expected that you bought a CD for music until then. As a very little kid I had cassettes for my sing-along tunes, by the time 6 or 7 (1997-1998), it feels like pretty much everyone had made the jump to CDs.

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