Most of the actual news about this project has already been covered elsewhere, so this is really just me indulging my love of strange physical gaming media and the wonderfully impractical things people come up with.
I’ve always been fascinated by oddities from gaming history, and the idea of someone getting Doom and Super Mario Bros. working with VHS tapes was far too interesting for me to ignore.
So here’s a little/casual dive into GCVHS, the bizarre Action Max console from 1987, and why I think there’s something super curious about people finding new uses for old technology. Sometimes I just like writing about things because they’re weird :)
What is turbo loading?
I just had an idea what the old generations could have done to load games faster. If you buy multiple cassettes and readers, then connect them to master device (to start and stop with a single button), and load them all at once from different positions. Basically hardware level multi-threaded loading if you will. I mean cutting the loading in half would be a huuge improvement already. Would this have been possible?
No idea if that was possible back then. My computer was only able to load from one cassette player. And it was slooow. Until my father (who was an electronics engineer) upgraded it somehow to support a turbo mode, it required pushing an additional button on the cassette player, and it just ran faster. The sound had a much higher pitch and the loading sometimes failed. But it was much faster.
I also remember “copying the game” by typing the machine code printed in the magazine. Funny times.
Machine code or BASIC possibly? I remember PC magazines hat sometimes BASIC games printed. At that time I didn’t own any sort of computer, so was always curious what that even was. I don’t remember seeing any machine code, but at that time everything was BASIC for me.
I think it was assembly, I am not sure what it was exactly (remember but 100% sure it wasn’t basic, because I was also trying to learn Basic back then. I would have recognized it. I knew a few Basic commands, so naturally I tried to write my own operating system. Hey, I was a kid