[HN Gopher] Tape Recovery Simulator 96K
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Tape Recovery Simulator 96K
Author : andy_herbert
Score : 68 points
Date : 2021-04-29 13:30 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bluesnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bluesnews.com)
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Interesting game idea :) I initially thought it could actually
| read old tapes, I was hoping this because I'm trying to recover
| some old Atari stuff. But no.
|
| Funny idea though!
| pronoiac wrote:
| Checking my bookmarks, look at wav2cas -
| http://home.planet.nl/~ernest/atarixle.html - though I haven't
| actually used it.
| antonyh wrote:
| Sadly shared too soon: it's not yet released. I hope it doesn't
| end up as vapourware, it'd be fun just for the nostalia.
| highspeedbus wrote:
| Doing the real thing is a lot of fun. Just need a bunch of used
| tapes and a walkman or generic tape recorder. You can convert
| files using kcs on msdos.
|
| 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.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Love the idea, but I'll just say they dev is really missing a
| trick here. For the UI they should follow Zachtronics lead and go
| extreme skeuomorphic, lots of dragging tapes into players and
| connecting cords, clicking buttons.
|
| 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.
| villgax wrote:
| Reminds me how how Basecamp would have acted during WW2 as well.
| Nothing to do with business so take it outside.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| actual link to official webpage about the game:
| http://caffeinewithdrawalgames.com/TRS/details.html
| bityard wrote:
| Now there's a domain name that I haven't heard in a very long
| time
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Right!? Up there with Adrenaline Vault, VE3D, and the original
| Shacknews before it got bought out. Good times...
| Fuzzwah wrote:
| And reminds me once again that .plan files and finger was
| twitter before twitter.
| Snoozus wrote:
| Great, where do I sign up?
| kencausey wrote:
| http://caffeinewithdrawalgames.com/TRS/details.html
|
| 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.
| Twirrim wrote:
| > Tape backups are still a thing in some places, but they are
| generally considered a relic of the past.
|
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| These are audio cassette backups, Commodore 64 style.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Not just backups. I bought software for my Atari 400 on audio
| cassette, back in the day.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I think by that they referred to audio cassette tapes
| specifically, not the custom tapes used for backups these days
| nor the tape reels of the 60s/70s. They don't use audio as an
| intermediate format like the 8-bit era tape drives did. As
| cleaning up this audio is the main gameplay mechanic here, it
| makes sense that that sentence refers to audio tapes
| specifically.
| jandrese wrote:
| So it takes 12.5 hours to fill a single tape?
|
| 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.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| They do, they are attached via FibreChannel or SAS for
| example. FC offers 16Gbits since 2011 and SAS 12G since 2013
| (and of course even faster versions since then).
|
| Though I would love a SATA-one for home use.
| pimlottc wrote:
| I mean, they're not wrong about the perception. Ask most
| people, even those in tech, and they will tell you that tape is
| passe. Personally, while I know it is still used in enterprise
| backup, I haven't actually seen a digital tape in use in over
| 20 years.
| [deleted]
| Zenst wrote:
| One of the biggest things that has been going for tape as
| archive/backup storage has been that it is proven durability
| compared to alternatives in regards to bit rot. AT least that
| was the mantra for decades, not been active for years so may of
| shifted and price of solid state and storage rotation I would
| of thought offset things. But then that would be a live backup
| as opposed to something you want to archive and maybe never
| touch for eons, maybe for some regulation aspect you just need
| to archive that data and in a form that is acceptable to the
| standards of that industry. Which would be another factor and
| that would be legacy - it works, it has worked for ages and
| proven and trusted in X use for X industry regulatory needs and
| as such - ticks an insurance/liability box. Things like that
| from a technical aspect get overlooked as it is not just the
| technical aspect but also the whole
| industry/business/regulatory standards.
|
| 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.
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| I learned recently that tapes are also quite common in the pro
| video world, as backup media and as a way to deliver projects!
|
| 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."
| efnx wrote:
| I love that this is blurring the lines about what the idea of a
| game is. I bet a lot of people will hate this game and a lot of
| people will love it (and a lot will just be like huh?).
|
| One thing for sure is that it looks interesting.
| the_af wrote:
| I can't tell if this is a joke or an actual game, but I find
| this blurring of the lines 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".
| frob wrote:
| I feel just about anything by Zachtronics fits this category.
| Spacechem was the title that got me back into indie gaming in
| 2012, but almost every single one of their games is
| essentially programming for fun. They really dropped the
| facade with Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100. The beautiful part
| about those games is how much story and narrative is pushed
| through design docs and specs and hidden man pages.
|
| 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.
| the_af wrote:
| Factorio is amazing and for a brief time I got really
| addicted to it. Like you said, you're debugging an giant
| circuit.
|
| 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!
| frob wrote:
| I've been playing the demo for a few hours a week over
| the past month. Any game that gets me to restart on the
| second level not because I'm dieing but because I think
| to myself, "No, I can do better than this," is a winner
| in my book. Also, if I've derived more fun from this demo
| than I have from many other $30 and $60 games, so I'm
| already leaving towards paying for the full game.
|
| 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.
| the_af wrote:
| Don't get me wrong -- I bought Factorio and adored every
| second of the first level or so. But the thought of going
| through it all a second time proved too mentally
| exhausting.
|
| I commend its creators, I just avoid the game now. Who
| knows, in a couple of years I may get hooked again.
| eru wrote:
| The author of Papers Please also made The Return of the Obra
| Dinn.
|
| It's another game about bureaucracy. This time you play as an
| insurance investigator.
| ansible wrote:
| I never got around to finishing that one.
|
| 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...
| the_af wrote:
| You should try to finish it, it's pretty satisfying.
|
| 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!
| jcranmer wrote:
| My recollection is that most of the multiple solutions
| are actually just cases where you're supposed to identify
| one correct solution, but how that solution actually maps
| to the very limited possible choices is ambiguous.
|
| 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).
| the_af wrote:
| I know what you mean, but didn't find it annoying. I'm
| also in the camp of people who enjoy that there's not
| teleport within the ship -- you must walk everywhere, and
| if this is tedious tough luck! Walking inside actual
| ships requires walking.
|
| 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.
| the_af wrote:
| Yes, of course, I love Obra Dinn too. But that's a more
| traditional tale of adventure, by the author's own
| admission -- that the player is an insurance investigator
| barely matters. You're on board a mysterious ship and must
| investigate its fate... sounds intriguing by definition!
| onurcel wrote:
| that's funny. I have a project of recovering a game I wrote on
| Commodore 64 as a kid. It is saved on an audio tape. You can
| guess I have a strong motivation since it's for getting back
| something personal. I have the wav files ready, and regular
| conversion programs fail to recover it.
|
| 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 :)
| [deleted]
| thamalama wrote:
| Been meaning to resurrect my old vic20 system just so I can wait
| in anticipation of my "game" to load from the cassette tape.
| Nostalgia is a helluva of a good drug.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| I think you can put the emulators in like a 1x mode? I do not
| look back fondly on waiting for things to load hahha
| bencollier49 wrote:
| This feels like an elaborate joke that I didn't get.
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