>Can theoretically store up to 2GB of data; more than twice as much as CDs>Probably even faster than cartridgesWhy didn't 5th generation game consoles use VHS tapes?
>>12122361The spectrum actuyally did although ingenious it was also flawedd in some ways. Its media was VHS tape but cut into thin very long ribbons that were as pic related is the inside of one, they were quite small just a few inches.
Yes, because everyone who was alive in the 1990's knows that VHS was famously so fast to rewind.
>>12122374Actually, yeah, it's not that fast, BUT:The Danmere Backer card (which could turn a VCR into a computer tape drive using VHS tapes) boasted a transfer speed of 150KB/sec. Which is pretty much on par with a 1x CD drive
I'm guessing CD's are like 20x cheaper to manufacture than these big ass tapes with moving parts.
>>12122361>>Probably even faster than cartridgesThis reads continuously from tape just like a disk. So you need to store it in internal memory.
>>12122368samefag so sinclair released the 'interface one' a peripheral with a rom containing the extra commands and code for driving them and it balso has a serial 3 wire port that could be used for limited rs232 and as a propriotory lan connector for spectrums you could then daisychain the microdrive readers out of it using microdrive connector cables. It was a low budger affordable alternative to floppy disks and when it worked it worked well but the cartidges wree sometimes bad and people either had a great time with it or a miserable time depending on whther they had a goof batch of cartriges or a bad one. VHS recorder platers were still quite expensive back then though so even though your idea is a good one back then it would have been just as cost effective for the money to get a few floppy disk drive. BY fifth gen ioptical disks wree out and they wree far far cheaper to make than VGS tapes and phyically smaller and less easily damaged with castly faster seek times. Think how you can jump from tavck to track on a misic CD well to do that on a VHS tape you would have to wait while it fast forwarded or rewond. Business were already using data tapes in other formats that were better than any VHS hack would have worked out and LTO drives were around by 2000.
>>12122368That looks like an 8 track tape (God's own format.)
>>12122393Imagine having to rewind your game.
>>12122406There were games on cassette tapes, so that was still a thing.
>degrades every time you play
it's a fun idea but it would have been seen as low tech. cartridges were already seen as antiquated and they're more advanced than tape tech.
Wasn't Night Trap originally some kind of interactive VHS game?
>>12122521Yes, the NEMO system used VHS tapes as media and they exploited video interlacing to store up to four unique video streams simultaneously, which the console could decode on demand from regular VHS playback stream.
>>12122361With tapes, seek time would have been a killer, and they would have been more expensive to manufacture and distribute compared to discs, and how would copy protection work? They'd also wear out. You'd lose streaming audio any time it needed to load game data from another part of the tape. There's really no upside.Little known fact about ****some**** disc games: ******some****** discs have multiple copies of the same data on different parts of the physical disc to reduce access time :O
The real problem is pinch rollers getting gummed up and needing replacements. Most people don't bother and then get mad when their tapes get eaten.>>12122603What would be stopping a tape game from also doing that?
>>12122361It is difficult to access the data at random as needed. It is not faster than cartridges.
>>12122361Tape loads sequentially. Ever used tape loading?
>>12122541>Yes, the NEMO system used VHS tapes as media and they exploited video interlacing to store up to four unique video streams simultaneously, which the console could decode on demand from regular VHS playback stream.Yeah, Night Trap was filmed in 1987, Sewer Shark was apparently filmed in 1988. Both games were meant to be for that Hasbro VHS game console that was developed bu Nolan Bushnell. The original intro that was filmed for Night Trap has the Commander guy hold up a NEMO prototype gamepad (??). I think by 1989 Hasbro backed out of the idea for some reason. The system would use normal VHS tapes. The VHS tapes would be multi-channel and even contain game data. The system would have a 8-bit CPU for overlays. https://youtu.be/QgVMoVZfgGE?t=107For the first run Sega CD version of Night Trap that was published by Sega... they actually hired the SCAT Commander actor and filmed a new intro with him holding a Sega genesis pad. Even the second print of Night Trap on the Sega CD uses the original intro. https://youtu.be/plV5l_uKzDo?t=92
>>12122361>Probably even faster than cartridgesLiterally what made you think this?There are several different types of magnetic storage for computers and they're all slow as fuck
>>12122361>Why didn't 5th generation game consoles use VHS tapes?Three big reasons:1. Ask anyone who used a computer that loaded games off of cassette tape how fun it was to wait 10 minutes for a game to load2. This would severely limit the scope of the games because due to the sequential nature of tape the entire game would need to fit in the console's memory.3. CDs for 99% of console games that came on CD were far far more storage than a game would ever need, and developers were intentionally filling them up with FMVs and voice acting just to use up that space, with most games still taking about half a CD even with that. For 99% of CD games they didn't NEED more space, and by the time most games did DVDs were a thing.To put that second one in perspective by the way: The NES has 2K of work RAM, 2k of video RAM, and 256 BYTES of sprite-RAM... the smallest NES game, Galaxian, was 16KB. And you want to use it for CD-based systems, which at the highest end had about 3-4 megs of RAM, the earlier ones having just a few KB... a single CD is already several HUNRED times the amount of space than the system has RAM.. and you want to cram 2GB in there with tape... By the way, remember how infamously slow the original Neo-Geo CD loaded with it's 1X CD-ROM drive? Now try replacing that medium which is about a hundred times slower at the time (Again 10 minutes to load less than 60K of memory off a cassette tape. While yes that was early 80s tape tech, it would not have been anywhere close to the speed of even a 1X CD in the 90s)And finally, they tried. The Atari 2600 had a device called the Supercharger which was a huge cart you plugged into it that added a massive 6K of RAM (from the 2600's original 128 BYTES), but it was because it loaded games off of cassette, which again took several minutes to load each time you turned on the console. 6KB was still smaller than many 2600 carts, but it being all RAM helped allow for games not possible on cart in different ways.
>>12123527>>12123567Coleco actually tried to invent non-sequential cassette tape storage for their Adam computer. Their cassettes were branded as Digital Data Packs and came pre-formatted with tape divided into numbered sectors of fixed length. Computer could ask tape drive to retrieve an arbitrary numbered sector containing data. Tape drive would then automatically rewind in needed direction until it found needed sector and load data from there. That meant that Coleco Adam could load bits of data from all over the tape without loading entire tape contents or user doing any inputs.
>>12122361Tape drives were a thing before discs.They were fucking horrible too. Then we have to consider seek times. You got data at the front, and the end. You need to pick a bit from both right after another.Good luck.
>>12122361>Can theoretically become old enough for 4chan some day>Probably cant cause tidepodsWhy didn't Zth generation use their brains?
>>12122393Tapes are more expensive to make now than CDs would have been to make back then.
>>12122485With the most ridiculous loading times imaginable.
>>12122361>play through level 1>listen for 15 seconds as tape rewinds to bonus stage>another 20 seconds fast forwarding to level 2>die>rewind 5 seconds to beginning of level 2
>>12123567Why do you make shit up? This is all nonsense.
>>12123567>1. Ask anyone who used a computer that loaded games off of cassette tape how fun it was to wait 10 minutes for a game to loadHonestky as someone who does that quite often it would be extremely rare if it was more than a few 3-5 minutes
Because game companies already experimented around with analog tape storage in the 80's, and decided it had too many problems to be worth it. Nintendo tried with the FDS, Data East tried it in the arcades with the DECO cassette system, etc. They stuck with ROMs until CD's came along.
>>12124214>Claims an entire post is nonsense>Does not elaborate in any wayYour post is nonsense
>>12124214Every bit of it. Cassette based tape storage is by FAR more efficient than 1x CD, with high end cassette storage being comparable to 4x CD or in some cases 8x.
>>12124540Too bad games don't read data sequentially
>>12123578Thank you for explaining that so clearly. My brother tried to explain that to me years ago but I couldn't pick up what he was laying down.
>>12124214>This is all nonsense.It is. Anons post wasn't.
>>12122603Would a tape that has four to six identical, thin sets of tape that can seek independent of each other solved this issue without ballooning the cost too much? I imagine you could do streaming audio very easily, if you had a single set of tape (Or even a pair so you can preload the next track to play) for audio data.
>>12125548I think the solution would be to stream the data off the tape as needed, while leaving the engine to run without stopping. Times Of Lore did this on the C64, there were no load times and you just wandered wherever you wanted. It used a disk but the principle is similar.The issue with tape is how to find the files. In the earliest tape formats the files were simple stored sequentially with no TOC, so the deck would have to seek to 'markers' that signified that a new file was there and then check to see if it was the desired file, if not it would skip to the next marker and check it. It was slow.Some tape drives with TOC's were already around for microcomputers by the time the home computer craze took off. HP's 9xxx machines which could take tape drives had space at the beginning of the tape for a table of contents where the files would be listed along with their sizes and locations, so the drive could seek straight to them. A sort of rudimentary file system. But this was not really popular for most home computers.I wonder how this system OP shows worked in practice. I remember reading about it way back in the day. I think it was pretty expensive, $500+ for the card.
Why didn't first gen consoles use reel to reel tape?
>>12125548>would a ridiculous convoluted rube goldberg machine imagined by a child who's never built anything work?Sure it would. Guaranteed to catch that road runner.
If Sony didn't have its head up its ass about separating MD music and MD Data they might have achieved economies of scale enough by the mid 90's to use these for a console. 140-200mb and the format supported hybrid discs - a portion of the disc could be read only and another portion writable. Imagine a SNES or playstation with 10mb+ of save space per disc with no need for a battery. The save data would never decay.
>>12125548How would you keep reading one track to keep playing the music while rewinding or fast-forwarding the tape to the other? Even with separate tracks you would still be moving the tape when you need to read from it elsewhere. You would need at least two separate spools of tape and set of spindles, and the tape player would then need to have two sets of heads and motors.>>12125759Because those were reely outdated by then.>>12125774>Imagine a SNES or playstation with 10mb+ of save space per discWhat would you even do with that much save space? SNES and even PS1 era games generally needed a few KB if not just a few bytes to save. Even today many if not most PC games have save files that are a few KB unless you fucked something up or your game needs to store a novel of information. I can only see that much space back then being useful for games that relied on image editing, and even Mario Paint was able to compress 99.99% of images to fit within it's 32K of SRAM. You would literally have had to go out of your way to intentionally make an impossible to compress image to make the save fail.
>>12125854You'd need multiple heads to read the tape. The concept really isn't much different from how a RAID works, though it'd be more expensive from a hardware standpoint.For example, if you had two tapes for an audio stream, you could play one, rewind the other to the start of a track, and start the second when you wanted to loop the audio. It's cumbersome but there's no technical reason it couldn't be done.
>>12122361VHS is closer to 50 GB. The 2 GB was for a backup system that uses big black and white squares that records and plays through a standard VCR over a video capture card. It doesn't use anything close to the limit of VHS. Just the audio by itself on VHS can hold more than a CD.
>>12122368>vhs tape but cut into think very long ribbonsso.. just tape then?>in some waysin many ways. they were terrible.>>12122389>it's not that fasti had software for my commodore amiga that let me use vhs for backups. vhs is capable of doing a few mbit per second. but i recall software for my amiga was way less than that because it wasn't efficient. sony pcm recorders could record cd audio at 1.5mbit/s on a vhs/beta etc. more than enough for consoles of the first few generations. the problem is getting the data into the console. most of them weren't designed for it. even though some have serial ports and other IO ports, they're pretty slow.
>>12127306I would think you could use a video toaster to generate a signal that could be sent. Reading it out might be tricky though.
>>12125854>hey man, check out my 360>sweet, let's play some halo- what the fuck is that?
>>12122361>>Can theoretically store up to 2GB of data>but only 6 hours of footage
>>12127413That's 2gb of digital data, and "theoretically" -- you're not gonna get that much realistically speaking. The 6 hours of video/audio is analog and thus uncompressed, which is naturally fucking huge.
>>12127364>I would think
>>12124595It doesn't have to necessarily
