Porting video games to VHS

old digital tape standards could store like 1.2Kb (not even kilo-bytes), but I wonder if with modern dsp techniques we could get it higher.

My napkin math says if tape has a bandwidth of about 10khz, and you could sample the tape with a 8bit dac at 10khz, then that would be 10KB/s, or about 36MB for a 60 minute tape, enough to store like maybe 10 minutes of medium quality music. If you dropped the bitrate of the mp3 down to 10KB/s then you’d even get the full 1 hour play time (I just hope you don’t like cymbals)

I agree, as the hardware of consoles etc. back then would have been perfectly capable of doing something like this (I think; haven't watched the video yet but I am pretty sure I understood the concept). It's almost a bit like a physical representation of an "alternate technical history" story.

In let's say 1996, we weren't remotely there yet. A radio program was distinct from a television program was distinct from a book was distinct from a CD was distinct from a CD-ROM was distinct from a video game... and so on and so forth. You had a tool for recording from the TV, the VCR, but that didn't do the radio. You had a tool for that, which was a cassette tape, but that didn't do anything else. Except for certain early computers who took advantage of the fact that a cassette tape is really just a recording of varying voltages which can be fed into a computer to be interpreted as numbers, but this is one of the rare exceptions where there was some crossover, and by the 1990s this was gone anyhow. Now you had floppy disks, which were for computers, and they didn't store movies or books or radio shows, they just stored computer programs.

Everything was compartmentalized so the idea of "storing a computer backup on a VHS tape" sounded like some sort of forbidden union.

What sort of fascinates me about this history is how so much of it is written into the law now. We have all these different laws where music is treated this way, but movies are treated that way, and books are treated some other way, and so on and so forth. Copyright law isn't quite entirely broken up into unrelated fiefdoms but neither is it anywhere near as unified as it would be if it was a brand new idea someone was coming up with today. And it still has trouble dealing with the concept of things like "databases" sometimes.

Now it's not such a weird idea that a VCR tape is really just a stream of numbers to be sliced and diced as needed for a project like this. But back then, so much of the processing involved fundementally analog processes that anything that crossed the streams seemed like magic. I don't feel like I've conveyed the idea properly that this wasn't just a technical thing, I'm talking about how people thought about these things. It was a revelation at the time that CDs could contain "video". It was a revelation that you could have "an MP3 player" that had "computer files", but, but, it played music. You could store backups on a CD. You could put a book... on a computer. I remember the first time I realized that if I took these cables from the VCR and fed them in to the input of my cassette player I could record the audio off a VCR on to a tape, the point being not that this was impossible but that it was something I had to realize. We had all these categories in our minds with strict boundaries between them that don't exist anymore, because those categories are just accidents of history.

What we have today is much closer to reality... it's all just numbers. Any numbers can go on to number storage devices. Any numbers can be streamed across the number delivery service. The tech industry is in fact busily trying to re-establish the boundaries they themselves erased so they can artificially segment the various markets again.

It's fun to see an old-school boundary breaker project again.

It uses two different ideas. One game is eight parallel plotlines apparently running on eight tracks of the tape and the interactivity is switching between them. The other is using the content from the tape as a background with a traditional video game overlayed.

It is based on older work from the heyday of VHS where the tape provided to background and the game was a lightgun with a hit counter.

If you wanted it to still play normally in a standard VCR (like it plays a recording of gameplay in a normal VCR, but loads the actual game in the custom vcr), you could store the data in the parts of the signal outside the normally rendered frame, like how captions are stored off the bottom of the screen. There's quite a few lines there that could be taken advantage of

Kind of like those 3.5mm to audio cassette adapters for old car stereos.

Based on the timing, I'm deeply surprised it came out 2 years after the NES was released in the US, but I suspect it was way cheaper, and bought by some number of clueless parents.

I had no idea! Cool project