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Sinclair ZX81: Audio Cassette-based Video Game? Crazy blast from the past.

post #1 of 26
10/2/07 at 1:40pm
Thread Starter 
A UK born and bred co-worker of mine brought in a cassette tape case of "his 1st video games". I looked at the contents in disbelief. They look like audio-cassettes, I said. He directed me to wikipedia and google and showed me a world of video games (from the same era as my beloved early 80's Atari Video Computer System, 2nd version) that I never knew existed...



Any Chewers out there play these games back in the day? Apparently there are emulators online available to revisit (if you dare) this format of primitive graphics and rip-off titles ("Kong", "Space Raiders", etc).




From wikipedia:

The Sinclair ZX81 home computer, released by Sinclair Research in 1981, was the follow up to the company's ZX80. The case was black, with a membrane keyboard; the machine's distinctive appearance was the work of industrial designer Rick Dickinson. Video output, as in the ZX80, was to a television set, and saving and loading programs was via an ordinary home audio tape recorder to audio cassette. Timex Corporation manufactured kits as well as assembled machines for Sinclair Research. In the United States a version with double the RAM and an NTSC television standard was marketed as the "Timex Sinclair 1000".

3D Monster Maze!



3D Monster Maze is a computer game developed by Malcolm Evans in 1981 for the Sinclair ZX81 platform with the 16KB memory expansion. The game was initially released by J.K. Greye Software in early 1982 and re-released later the same year by Evans' own startup, New Generation Software. Rendered using low-resolution character block "graphics", it was the first 3D game for a home computer.
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post #2 of 26
10/2/07 at 1:44pm
I had something similar back in the day, it was a cartridge that connected to a tape deck, and there were some pretty cool games. I can't for the life of me remember what the name was.
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post #3 of 26
10/2/07 at 1:50pm
A-HA!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starpath_Supercharger

I had all them games except the Communist Mutants from Space.
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post #4 of 26
10/2/07 at 1:50pm
I actually built one of that computer's predecessor's, the Timex ZX 80 out of parts ordered from Popular Mechanics back in 1981.

It only had 1K of memory, but those games there ran on the North American ZX81 version, the Timex Sinclair 1000, on a whopping 2k of memory.

Ahhhh....Those where the days.
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post #5 of 26
10/2/07 at 2:00pm
Sadly, I never got to sample these games. My first computer system was a Texas Instruments system, so I played the amazingly sophisticated game "Hunt the Wumpus."
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post #6 of 26
10/2/07 at 2:06pm
Dude, if americans really didn't have general access to spectrums then you guys, as a country, missed out. also, the games you show there are like the early early stuff that was made for the first iterations of the spectrum. The clone I had, the Timex 2048 (48K RAM!! ROCK!) has a LOT more elaborate games. For a great example, see this youtube video of R-Type: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQrWLmkAj_Q

image: http://www.mobygames.com/game/zx-spe...eShotId,84915/

to see how much I like that game system, check this page. name ring a bell? http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infos...cgi?id=0000295
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post #7 of 26
10/2/07 at 2:09pm
Yep, I remember the first game I had that loaded from a cassette. Bruce Lee, I played it on an Atari 800.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Lee_%28video_game%29
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post #8 of 26
10/2/07 at 2:38pm
if you're either curious or nostalgic, go to this page here: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/bestgames.html

it's a list of the voted best 100 games for the ZXS. Most of them, if you click the name, give you a page of info that has somewhere to the bottom of it, a button with a Java logo. Click on that, and you can play the game inside the browser.
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post #9 of 26
10/2/07 at 4:50pm
My neighbor had a Sinclair. Boy, it was the shit back then. And boy, was it a total piece of shit back then. The keyboard had these Chiclet-type keys that were hard as hell to press. Forget "typing" on it. It's easier to text on a Blackberry.

I had a TI-99/4A, another neighbor had a Vic 20. I saved and loaded shit using a tape recorder all the time. I even had the volume control knob marked to know the "sweet spot" of where the volume needed to be to do a load. Nothing like sitting there listening to those sounds and just praying that it suddenly doesn't stop and you get "Error on device load" message. "Adventure" I believe was the first game I loaded and played on my TI. One of my proudest days was when I bought the TI "Peripheral Expansion Box" which had a card that increased my RAM to 32k and added a 5 1/4" floppy drive. That thing cost like $600.
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post #10 of 26
10/2/07 at 8:24pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by rabigjb
Yep, I remember the first game I had that loaded from a cassette. Bruce Lee, I played it on an Atari 800.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Lee_%28video_game%29
Bruce Lee!!! YES!!! Loved that game.

Never saw the Sinclair, but I remember those days of cassettes, floppy disk games, and TRS-80.

I've said it before, but you aren't a true gamer if you've never spent 4 hours typing in assembly code, another 2 hours debugging it manually with your eyes, and then playing a sub-par Atari 2600 game. All for the price of one magazine, and time you'll never get back.
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post #11 of 26
10/2/07 at 9:48pm
The old Commodore 64s used to use cassettes as well. I remember having to wait 18 minutes for games to load early on but after a while they were able to refine it down to a more respectable 8 minutes.
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post #12 of 26
10/3/07 at 9:43am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Allen
I've said it before, but you aren't a true gamer if you've never spent 4 hours typing in assembly code, another 2 hours debugging it manually with your eyes, and then playing a sub-par Atari 2600 game. All for the price of one magazine, and time you'll never get back.
COMPUTE! Magazine was the main one I went to, as it was one of the few that had games translated for the TI.
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post #13 of 26
10/3/07 at 4:38pm
You never knew cassette software existed?

My UK cousins had one of those Sinclairs. I remember playing a fairly good if graphically primitive tennis game. Then we left on vacation for a few weeks, and I forgot to turn it off. When we got back it was fried. Oops.
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post #14 of 26
10/3/07 at 7:05pm
'Real men' used to manually TYPE IN their games...and then spend several hours/days searching for the typos that were stopping them from working properly. Sadly those days have long-passed.

All you kids with your fancy 'store-bought, ferric-oxide layered, only takes 25 minutes to load, Devil's Devices' have NO right looking so Goddamn smug.

If it wasn't for ME, and men LIKE me, you'd all be coding Pascal!
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post #15 of 26
10/3/07 at 7:58pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham
'Real men' used to manually TYPE IN their games...and then spend several hours/days searching for the typos that were stopping them from working properly. Sadly those days have long-passed.

All you kids with your fancy 'store-bought, ferric-oxide layered, only takes 25 minutes to load, Devil's Devices' have NO right looking so Goddamn smug.

If it wasn't for ME, and men LIKE me, you'd all be coding Pascal!
I was really, really young when I first tried typing in games and playing them (we weren't allowed to bring software to school, so we had to type them in to play). All that went away when my parents purchased a Colecovision -- kind of wish I'd stuck with the whole "computer programming" thing. Of course, I switched back to computers halfway through the NES era, and never returned to the console realm until the Playstation.

**Dragonstomper sounds way, way, way ahead of its time.
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post #16 of 26
10/4/07 at 10:51am
Those were heroic days. No modern game can make me feel as good as the games back then. Not that they were better, most of them were actually shit. It was just such an original experience. I remember I would buy a computer magazine, head on to my buddy's house and just spend hours typing in the code. When you finally got the game to run you felt like a god.
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post #17 of 26
10/4/07 at 11:04am
10 PRINT "MICHAEL RULES OK"
20 GOTO 10

RUN

...anyone remember Horace and the Spiders?? Good times. Good times.

Couple of years later I traded in my 16k Speccy for a BBC Micro - and was then bought Elite - the Halo3 of it's day...
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post #18 of 26
10/4/07 at 11:21am
I'm pretty sure that if we try to convince a modern kid that we used to load games from audio tapes, we'll end up heavily medicated in an old folks' home.
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post #19 of 26
10/4/07 at 11:34am
Remember half the loading time was dedicated to downloading(???) a heavily pixelated version of the front cover of the cassette. It appeared in quarter chunks...

...can't believe the yanks never had specys...
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post #20 of 26
10/4/07 at 11:36am
Early video game covers were the last great form of pop art. They were wonderfully crass.
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post #21 of 26
10/4/07 at 11:48am
Quote:
Originally Posted by mastronikolas
Early video game covers were the last great form of pop art. They were wonderfully crass.
And generally held little relevance to the content of the game...
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post #22 of 26
10/4/07 at 2:34pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by mastronikolas
I'm pretty sure that if we try to convince a modern kid that we used to load games from audio tapes, we'll end up heavily medicated in an old folks' home.
You mean you're NOT??
...and, dammit, GET THOSE KIDS OFF MY LAWN!!
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post #23 of 26
10/4/07 at 2:38pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Stale Elvis
...can't believe the yanks never had specys...
They got lumbered with Kevin Specy; 'schadenfreude' has NEVER felt so good...
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post #24 of 26
10/4/07 at 2:49pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by stelios
Those were heroic days. No modern game can make me feel as good as the games back then. Not that they were better, most of them were actually shit. It was just such an original experience. I remember I would buy a computer magazine, head on to my buddy's house and just spend hours typing in the code. When you finally got the game to run you felt like a god.
I remember typing up some Olympic-like game for my friends Vic-20. We edited all the "Congratulations" or "You Win" screens to say "You're Fuckin' Rad"...yep, that was a sad, sad time in my life.
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post #25 of 26
10/4/07 at 3:02pm
I had a cassette of a chess game for a pre-Tany Radio Shack computer. I was able to beat the computer at age 9.
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post #26 of 26
10/5/07 at 4:49am
Quote:
Originally Posted by mastronikolas
Early video game covers were the last great form of pop art. They were wonderfully crass.
Atari usually had great cover art.
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