[HN Gopher] The British computer magazine cover tape
___________________________________________________________________
The British computer magazine cover tape
Author : donohoe
Score : 48 points
Date : 2023-03-20 11:17 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (commodoreformatarchive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (commodoreformatarchive.com)
| mattl wrote:
| An issue of Amstrad Action had MIDI software on one side of the
| cassette and a track made using the software in audio form on the
| other.
| [deleted]
| scoot wrote:
| Not just cassettes but "vinyl" - a 45rpm single on thin flexible
| plastic. More space efficient than cassettes for magazine
| distribution, but a nightmare to load!
| vmilner wrote:
| The ZX spectrum tapes were great near the end, though you
| realised that top price games were reaching the magazines so
| quickly that it clearly _was_ near the end.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/zxspectrum/comments/gibilh/software...
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/FloppyRo...
|
| There was also software distributed on Flexi Disc. I'm pretty
| sure there was for C64 too.
| daneel_w wrote:
| _> "I'm pretty sure there was for C64 too."_
|
| Yes, I have one stashed away somewhere. I _think_ it came with
| an issue of Compute! 's Gazette, though I'm not entirely sure.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| This brings back so many memories. Most of them not good...
|
| As a university student in 199mumble I had a side gig as the
| (freelance) technical writer for Amstrad Action - the magazine
| that pioneered covertapes, as explained in the article. The
| actual writing was easy and I could do it in my sleep: mostly
| answering readers' questions about printers, or reviewing the few
| applications still being released for the Amstrad CPC.
|
| But I also put together the covertapes. And that was _hard_.
|
| The main drawback is that I was very lucky if I got a master tape
| of the game. Mostly I just got a standard retail copy. That meant
| it invariably had copy-protection on of some sort... and I'd have
| to decrypt that to make a new master for Future Publishing to
| send to their duplicators (Ablex Audio Video). Fortunately I knew
| a couple of the best "crackers" working on the CPC, and I wasn't
| entirely a slouch myself, but even then it was a bunch of
| unnecessary effort.
|
| As AA neared its end, the editorial team gave me a bit extra to
| not only produce the cover tape, but to commission the software
| on it as well. Occasionally I'd turn up a winner. A friend of a
| friend at university turned out to know the author of Chuckie
| Egg, the all-time classic 8-bit platform game, so I got that
| pretty easily. (Without copy protection!) That was a good moment.
| But often it'd just be some less than impressive game from the
| late 80s that hadn't sold particularly well first time round.
|
| And as the article alludes, there were inevitably bugs. Finding
| out, after 10,000 copies of a tape have been duplicated, that it
| won't work properly on one of the three models of CPC... that
| wasn't a great moment. Ah well. We printed a bugfix in the next
| issue. Tapes were sufficiently unreliable that I suspect half the
| users just thought there was a loading error anyway.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| You say the writing was easy, but I seem to remember inventing
| questions about connecting your toaster to your CPC. :-)
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| How do you copy-protect a tape? Isn't it just audio? Can't you
| just duplicate it?
| darrenf wrote:
| Copy protection of tape games took a different form. It
| wasn't that you couldn't make a copy, but there were extra
| barriers to making it playable. Eg Jet Set Willy came with a
| card on which was printed a coloured grid, and upon loading
| the game prompted you to enter the colours found at random
| coordinates before it would start.
| http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/57256/Jet-Set-
| Willy-C...
|
| Copying that card was high effort, since no one had camera
| phones or scanners or photocopiers etc.
| becurious wrote:
| LensLok!
|
| http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/56946/Lenslok-
| Softwar...
|
| Trying to play Elite on Christmas Day and repeatedly
| failing to enter the correct two letters!
| vmilner wrote:
| Thankfully I won a Multiface memory snapshot device in a
| magazine competition and could bypass all this stuff...
| aidos wrote:
| Hat tip to you, my friend! A small data point as to how your
| bad memories balance out the universe.
|
| Despite not having a lot of disposable income, my parents got
| me a subscription to AA (staring somewhere in the late 80s).
| Receiving each new edition was the most exciting thing in the
| world as a kid. I could not _wait_ to get home and see what was
| on the tape this time. The magic of software that was instilled
| in me in those moments has stayed with me for life.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Same, but... Your Sinclair. (Also from Future Publishing).
| One of the best games I've ever played was on a cover tape:
| Chaos: Battle Of Wizards.
| vmilner wrote:
| Gooey blob!
| raffraffraff wrote:
| If you managed to raise a golden dragon from the dead and
| hop onto it, you were pretty much invincible.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| YS was originally Dennis Publishing and was bought by
| Future in 1990.
|
| Learning from TFA that they nearly failed with their
| Amstrad offering yet ended up buying Your Sinclair is a
| spooky synchronicity!
| vmilner wrote:
| Author interview:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lbbQdwu1djc
| mig39 wrote:
| As a Canadian kid, I spent summers in Portugal, in my mom's
| hometown. My grandfather ran the local newsstand, and I spent _a
| lot_ of my summer vacation reading English computer magazines.
|
| It was a completely different world than the North American
| magazines we'd get back in Canada. I'd come home, after vacation,
| with magazines with tapes and eventually floppies.
|
| I don't think I'd be the nerd I am today without those magazines!
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Cover tapes, then cover floppies, then cover discs were how I
| acquired the _vast_ majority of my software as a kid, in the pre-
| internet and then the achingly slow internet days.
|
| I was also, as mentioned, a kid, and therefore penniless until I
| started making money doing software at 12 -- C64 magazines I got
| via school from the science teacher, but later on at another
| school I'd toddle down to WH Smith, scoop up Amiga
| Shopper/Format/Power, PC Gamer/World/Pro/Mag, take them home,
| copy the discs over the older cover floppies that I'd drilled to
| be able to write, reseal them, and return them for store credit.
| I'd repeat the shenanigan once a month, occasionally keeping a
| particularly cool issue if I was feeling flush.
|
| I figured I was stealing marketing, and only pirating it at that
| - and as an adult with a clear understanding of how the magazine
| industry worked, as I ended up providing technical services to a
| large publisher in the early noughts, I honestly don't feel bad.
| Until the death knell of broadband, they were raking it in on
| both sides from advertisers and consumers. That and I learned so
| much from the various software I nicked over the years.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Fond memories of "Cursor" magazine from the very dawn of the
| personal computer era. The earliest issues still had the reversed
| upper/lowercase from being targeted at the original PET
| computers. The games and demos were so cool for their era with
| their cute PETSCII graphics animations and such. And nowadays the
| whole thing is only a click away...
|
| http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/magazines/cursor/inde...
| rob74 wrote:
| Although the cover tapes died in 1995, the cover [floppy] disks
| and then CDs lasted a bit longer...
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| In a world before the web, and when a modem cost more than a
| computer, it's hard to overstate how important these tapes were
| for getting access to new software. They were horribly slow to
| load from and barely contained any data, but wow they were
| exciting!
| zabzonk wrote:
| > The British computer magazine cover tape
|
| perhaps "The British computer magazine cover CASSETTE tape"?
| jameshart wrote:
| How do you think the cassette was held on to the magazine
| cover?
| zabzonk wrote:
| normally way back then it was by glue.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| That lovely gummy stuff that would roll off the glossy
| cover.
| zabzonk wrote:
| i would not say that it was lovely, but it generally came
| off without tearing. i suppose you could do potentially
| obscene things with it, once you got it off. not that i
| not do any such stuff, of course.
| edent wrote:
| I recall one Sega magazine had a cover VIDEO tape. It was a 20
| minute preview of all the cool games coming out for the MegaCD, I
| think.
|
| That was amazing to me in those pre-VOD days.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >In memoriam: AOL CDs, history's greatest junk mail
|
| https://www.vox.com/2015/5/12/8594049/aol-free-trial-cds
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-03-20 23:01 UTC)