Software Distribution By Vinyl

townxelliot writes "Beige Records is home to the intriguing 8-Bit Construction Set. Their record has the distinction of being "the first ever use of the vinyl recording medium for software distribution - the inside tracks are audio data which can be dubbed to cassette tape and booted in your respective atari or commodore 8-bit computers". Samples of their music ("entirely programmed in 6502 assembly language") are available for download."

does this mean

[Festering Leper]

that we'll start getting floppy 45's in magazines again?

Ahhh the good old days....

[Anonymous Coward]

when copyright infringement of computer games could be done with a double cassette deck.

Some good decks could even reliably copy games in high speed dubbing mode.

Whoohoo!

don't play it backwards

[circletimessquare]

if you play it backwards you can briefly hear a voice say "6502 is dead"

vinyl is for sissies

[Anonymous Coward]

Real Men use eight tracks.

ahh...

[CdBee]

but I need to know before I buy - is the record DRM-laden ?

Imagine...

[IversenX]

...if you wrote DeCSS in this. Perhaps the MPAA and the RIAA would sue each other over who has the right to sue you, thus annihilating themselves into pure energy?

AOL

[Anonymous Coward]

that we'll start getting floppy 45's in magazines again?

AOL will of course be the first and largest user of this new medium.

6502 Assembly Language

[bigtallmofo]

* = $C000:.MEM
LDA #115
JSR $FFD2
LDA #108
JSR $FFD2
LDA #097
JSR $FFD2
LDA #115
JSR $FFD2
LDA #104
JSR $FFD2
LDA #100
JSR $FFD2
LDA #111
JSR $FFD2
LDA #116
JSR $FFD2

SYS 49152

I wonder if slashdot has ever been output in 6502 assembly language before?

Re:don't play it backwards

[lakerdonald]

Microsoft implants subliminal Messages:

Linus is Dead! Linus is Dead!

Hah!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been joking about LP-ROMs for years :)

Re:6502 Assembly Language

[kb]

If it has, I bet it wouldn't crash the system afterwards... unlike your version ;)

(anyone else missing an RTS or JMP $FFD2 instead of the last JSR here? ;)

Terminator X

[FidelCatsro]

This is a cool idea aslong as you dont have public enemy over to have cucumber sandwiches too often, i can imagine that Terminator X and his scratching antics could cause some problems

Re:Imagine...

[Capt'n Hector]

I'm sure they'd both sue you...

Re:does this mean

[bessel]

This is nothing. The druids used rocks to store the null character '\0' many hundreds of years ago.

When I was a kid...

[marsu_k]

and the C64 was oh-so-popular, the local radio station used to send freeware C64 programs over radio so you could record them on a tape and use with your Commodore. It was good listening also, if you happened to like industrial/noise.

Re:TI-99/4A

[skurk]

My debut was on the Oric 1 [pc-museum.com] back in 1983. Now, loading games from tape was pretty time consuming, but the Oric had an option that made it even slower.

For those of you who ever tried an Oric, you may remember the default load command; CLOAD "". But if you prepended ",S" it would go into something called a slow mode. ON A CASSETTE.

Loading "The Hobbit" in slow mode took about 25 minutes, and I'm not even kidding here. It was so slow that you could almost hear every bit and tell wether it was a cool game or not before typing "RUN".

Scannable?

[zerblat]

Now the question is, if you don't have a gramophone, can you read the data with a scanner [huji.ac.il]?

Great.Now who makes A/V software for my turntable?

[Powertrip]

Great. Now who makes A/V software for my turntable?

This story should have been posted later

[RockClimb]

A story like this should have been posted later in the day.... I woke up, went to slashdot, read the story and for a brief second thought the last 25 years of my life had been some type of twisted dream and that I was late for school. Gee thanks guys.... I nearly had a heart attack ;)

Music on cheese? Whoa.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a somewhat musical engineering grad code monkey geek from Wisconsin, I must say, Keanu-style, "Whoa."

So, let's see... easy listening can go on Neufchatel, rock would obviously be cheddar (classic rock on mild, alternative on medium, and hard rock on sharp in order to be able to support the modulation), and country would be Swiss (if only so that there will be breaks in the asinine monotony).

Re:Increasing amount of data.

[Anonymous Coward]

less of the "musics"?

Re:Ahhh the good old days....

[BearJ]

So back then, we used equipment for music to copy computer programs. As opposed to today, when we use computers to copy music. What an age we live in!

Re:Ahhh the good old days....

[acariquara]

Yep. The turntables were turned.

Re:Increasing amount of data.

[GeckoX]

You used mobius records I presume? ;)

Re:vinyl is for sissies

[cosmic_0x526179]

Real Men use eight tracks.

Screw that. Gimme a nice solid deck of 5081 cards any day. Now that was data ! Back when a Megabyte was enough to make your back sore. 1MB = 1,048,576 bytes = 13,108 cards = ~6.5 boxes of cards (at roughly 10 lbs/box) = ~65 lbs. Were talking serious data here.

Audiophiles...

[tonywestonuk]

...Of course, there are many of us who truly believe the quality of software distributed by Vinyl, will always be higher than that distributed by CD-ROM.

Old spectrum joke

[Anonymous Coward]

me:I got a great new game for the speccy!
friend:wow, can i get a copy?
me:sure
boooooo boop
boooooo booop
booble de booble de booble
boobde boop

the long winter nights used to just fly by :-)

Re:Pirating Over College Radio Waves

[flyingsquid]

That's nothing. We used clay tablets to record our binary. It really sucked if you spilled water on your programs and they would just turn into a pile of mud. We transmitted these programs using huge drums made out of mammoth hide which would boom the code out across the frozen hills. You'd sit in your cave (where the cave walls amplified the transmissions) and copy the code down onto your mud tablet and then set it by the fire to dry. Sometimes when you were gathering the mud it would get stuff in it like spiders and ants and you'd have to pick them out and then they'd sting you; and that's how we invented debugging. And once our code got dry we sat around and got really depressed because computers hadn't been invented yet. So we'd go outside and trudge uphill through the snow for six miles. We didn't even trudge to school uphill six miles, because school hadn't been invented yet. We just trudged because that's all there was to do to keep your mind off the fact that computers didn't exist. We once tried to invent a computer. We got a mammoth skull and figured the hardware would go inside the skull and the big hole in the skull where the trunk came out could hold the display, so it would be an all-in-one form factor. But then we didn't get much further than that. We couldn't decide whether to use mud, or sticks, or flint for the CPU. Vinyl disks? You modern, post ice-age geeks just don't know how good you have it.