Nowadays, if you want to play a new video game you have to shell out $60 online or in-store. In the late 70s and 80s you could simply turn on the radio to get a brand new video game on your computer. Do you remember? 80's videogames from the radio!
Downloading video games from the radio might seem like a fairly advanced ability before wi-fi, but thanks to the way the first computers were designed, it was commonplace.
Videogame from the radio: how was it possible?
Let's take a step back to the 70s. The fantastic world of 70s arcade videogames (tears!). Atari was all the rage, electronic gaming was progressively cleared through customs, and from bars it moved closer to homes. In 1977, the world's first PCs with a microprocessor were launched. They were theApple II (my dad bought it practically immediately and with huge economic sacrifice), PET Commodore and TRS-80.
All these machines had one thing in common: they used audio cassettes for storage.
Hard drives at the time were still quite expensive and everyone at the time had access to cheap audio cassettes.
Early computer designers actually pushed cassette storage because it helped the rapid adoption of PCs. As PCs became more common, so did the emergence of their use as video game machines.
During the 80s, engineers at NOS, a Dutch broadcasting organization, created something incredible: radio games.
Since computer programs and video games were stored on audio cassettes, this meant that their data could be easily transmitted via radio. They began taking programs and video games and setting up shows where people could “download” the games onto their personal computers.
The audio transmitted was reminiscent of starting a dial-up modem. In the video below you can hear a trace (indeed, from the video you could also download the game on our PC!)
Video game radio programs
NOS started a radio program specifically for broadcasting game data called “hobby scoop“, and became incredibly popular. The company even created a standard cassette format called BASICODE to ensure computer compatibility.
Eventually, the broadcasting of games through computers was so popular that radio shows emerged around the world. The right path to an arcade seemed to go through the XNUMX's radios.
80's shows were all the rage. A Yugoslavian station called “Ventilator 202” broadcast 150 programs between 1983 and 1986. It became a convenient way to share computer programs, educational tools, encyclopedias and even flight simulators.
The radio speaker Zoran Modli informed Radio Belgrade technicians that only "hissing and growling" would be heard during the minutes of the broadcast. A shocking statement for anyone who had no knowledge of what was going on.
A 40×80 pixel “poster”.
Vintage Premise: The first video game broadcast on the radio comes from Radio West in the UK. A 40 pixel by 80 pixel black and white image of Charlie's Angels star Cheryl Ladd.
Joe Tozer, the host of the show, said of that event: “The evening was quite exhilarating. I had written the Cheryl Ladd graphics code myself, as it was small and could easily be coded for both the BBC and the ZX81 Micros, and it seemed really amazing to have images transmitted over the radio. I think we did a couple of unannounced test broadcasts, and surprisingly we found that AM worked better than FM. The night the recorded program came out everything worked wonderfully. And here she is on the screen: Cheryl Ladd in glorious 40x80 pixel black and white Teletext style. “
From that event was born a show called “Datarama” which made video game broadcasts on the radio regular.
How did it happen?
To transmit digital data, the sound must be modulated using different techniques such as ASK – Amplitude Shift Keying, PSK – phase shift keying or QAM – Quadrature amplitude modulation. I will not go into what each of these techniques entails, I can say that they simply take the data in a format and translate it into data that can be transmitted on public radio.
When he finished transferring video games from the radio
This futuristic and intriguing process of porting video games to the radio eventually came to an end in the late 80s, when 16-bit computing became commonplace. Goodbye electronic radio games from the 80s. The processors for these computers were much faster and therefore required much more storage capacity, 250 times more than previous computers. This meant that cassette storage was no longer possible and that manufacturers would begin using floppy disks and hard disks for mass computer storage.
As the transmission of video games over radio waves died out, the main wireless data transmissions also stopped.
