LGR - Loading PC Games from Reel to Reel

I'm holding out hope that an even madder madman will get in touch letting me know how it can be done after this video goes live, heh. Someone's had to have tried to load Doom from tape using crazy compression or something.

LGR

I've never had any problems with it! Been using that H2n to record all kinds of sound cards and wildly different audio sources, new and old, since 2013 and it's still good.

LGR

Ha! Not a bad idea.

LGR

Well, you can boot from vinyl: https://hackaday.com/2020/11/23/booting-a-pc-from-vinyl-for-a-warmer-richer-os/

I have to wonder if LGR can take an MP3 of the song “Kansas City” and save it to tape as a file. (I was hoping for more KC schtick.)

TroyTakesPhotos

SHHHH! Don't give him ideas! ...Actually, give him ideas like that.

Rick Green

absolutely love it!

Chris Love

I wonder if you could record files on CD? Not CD-ROM, but audio CD.

Steve Lovelace

I think I need a “there is no practical reason to do what we are about to do” t-shirt.

I see you a recording with a zoom recorder of some kind. Perhaps you know this. I bought the zoom h5. Would you be worried about connecting it to different sound cards or will the line in be able to handle it? I broke the line input on my laptop because of to high volume.

Uncleawesome

I love this kind of wackiness for its own sake. I think I've shared this story, but back in high school, my grandfather had an organ with a built in Leslie speaker, and I wanted that sound on my guitar. And it also had a tape deck for playing back recordings, and could do that through the Leslie. So I used one of those car CD adapter cassette thingies, and routed from my amp's headphone output to the car adapter to the tape deck to the Leslie speaker. As much to see if I could as anything else.

John Covil

This was a real trip down memory lane for me. As an Audio-Radio salesman in college, I sold Tandberg Tape Recorders for Sam Goody in NYC. I also own both of the KC standard devices you showed, the SWTPC AC30 and the Percom CIS+ (rockin' it at 1200 baud) that I had for my SWTPC 6800 system. That Pioneer receiver was also familiar since I owned a similar model.

Brian Lawson

I loved my old Teac reel-to-reel machine. It was a musical wonder, for sure.

Saw this crop up in my email and muttered "Clint, you fuckin' madman" as I opened it. Sad that Doom was far too impractical for this, but still an excellent time.

Valora Inverse

Next time on LGR: Loading Commander Keen from paper tape

BastetFurry

Could the first character be the byte length of the file or the checksum?

Braxen

I don't know how it could be done, but it would be absolutely great (and ridiculous) to put DOS on tape, and somehow boot from it.

Kevin Tangney

You could cheat a bit and speed up encoded wavs before recording them to the tape and then slow them down before decoding. Seems like this tape could handle much higher speed.

naorunaoru

If you haven't seen it, this earlier LGR video looked at a product that backed up to VHS, although I think that only used the video bandwidth and ignored audio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUS0Zv2APjU

Sir Alister Octopus says Form a Union!

Perhaps, and some strange post-apocalyptic world, where only VHS decks are left, we can still play our 1980s games being read off vhs. 😁 Truly, it was an interesting thought experiment and exploration on your part. I wonder if something could be done for storing data on VHS but taking advantage of the video space as well as audio for data. I wonder what the theoretical practical maximum data storage is of a VHS tape.

CubicleNate

Absolute madlad, lmao. I love how versatile loading data via audio is. You can technically load it from any storage medium capable of storing audio. Vinyls, VHS and compact cassette tapes, reel-to-reels, CDs (as audio and not as actual data), etc. It's always hilarious and fascinating to store data on something you don't normally associate with data. And yeah this is beyond impractical. Nobody nowadays wants to wait almost 10 minutes to load up a Kroz game but sometimes it's worth doing just for the sake of doing it.

Alyxx the Rat

Thanks for video. This tickled me just the right way. And there are few things better than waking up to Canyon.mid on a Saturday morning :)

Jan-Marten de Boer

Clint has to be stopped!! Today's it's just reel to reel shenanigans. But soon... "Today on LGR, we'll be using a local fcc dtv tower to backup a pc wirelessly to my house using the danmere backup system!!." A week later "Greetings today we'll be looking at some prison oddware. Most notably this spoon that's also a fork!!"

PiraTed

This sounds like something I would do just to see if I could. Awesome!

Jacob

I always love when you get weird and do stuff like this, what a fun video to watch!

DFawlt Uzr

For reel? Yay!

LGR

If only I had tens of thousands of feet worth of tape and several days to record them, ha. 6+ megabytes would be one hefty stack of reels.

LGR

I know it wasnt going to be practical, but I am disappointed we didnt get to see Duke 3D on tape.

Garoninja

That was REELY good!

Perifractic's Retro Recipes

Yep! Here it is in the meantime https://archive.org/details/kcs08

LGR

Will you be adding a link to the KCS software in the description of the final video?

Jim Leonard

I haven't seen that one in particular, but I've seen a number of his videos before!

LGR

Awesome stuff as always. Have you seen any of DankPods videos? he often mentions you and techmoan and in his latest video mentioned both being a fan of yours and also wanting to get into reel to reel collecting but expressed how crazy expensive it is... and here is you playing canyon.mid off it, love it!

Mya Crosbie-Styles

Only the most pressing issues on my channel, it's true.

LGR

Say 'minidisc' three times in a mirror and he appears behind you.

LGR

Thanks! An LGR viewer got in touch after hearing me talk about wanting a nice R2R deck on an episode of Thrifts, and he put me in touch with his father who sells them on Etsy. He gave me a fair deal on it and packed it extremely well!

LGR

That is a particularly lovely deck my dude :D

Greg Allen

Where is Techmoan.

Joe Conti

Now is because he asks the important questions like this that I subscribe to LGR

Hernando Heilbron