Did anyone actually buy this thing? Let me know if you have any memories of seeing this in the shops or if you bought it, and what CD player did you hook it up to? As always if you love what we do in The Cave and would like to support the channel then head on over to patreon.com/retromancave - Thank you for your support. Neil - RMC
Hi Neil. Never heard about the CD 8bit home computer stuff until you put it in your other video. Fortunately a TurboDuo console (PCE Duo USA version) - grey import - was my first CD based gaming gear - good times and many HuCards are still among my collection today :-) That poor old CDRom Rom... fancy it being subjected to 'Spectrum' data lol
The only reason I didn't ever get this was because I couldn't afford a CD player. By the time I did own one, I had brought a disk drive and forgot about the concept
My best mate had a Speccy and his parents had a (very expensive) Pioneer stereo stack system too, and the 6 disc CD changer in it also had a single caddy cartridge so the Codemasters CD he got for his birthday in November went in there. He had to use a converter on the joystick jack lead, as that Pioneer system used the larger (older?) headphone jack standard. As you've identified in your video, it wasn't usual to have a CD player at that time- my parents certainly didn't, and I was therefore happy to spend time around his place with all his stuff, the lucky sod! But I remember we were around 13/14 years old at the time, and were more fascinated by the technology side of things, like faster loading and the fact that the loader stayed resident in memory, rather than the actual games themselves. We're both working in IT as adults, you'd never guess would you...!
Yep, I did, still got it as well in a box in the loft along with the rest of my Spectrum games! I had a ZX Spectrum +3 (which I still have and use with a Zaxon SD interface), I think I got the CD Games Pack for a birthday or Christmas, I can't remember now. The only place in the house I could use it was in the living room, as that's where we had a Sanyo DCX891 (just found that model number!) all in one CD stack system (still got that as well!) that my parents had bought not long before along with the Mitsubishi 21" Nicam Stereo Fastext TV. I used to get the old TV from the living room when it was replaced so I had the 20" colour TV (that the Mitsubishi had replaced) in my bedroom, which was great, especially when I later got a NES and later still a Megadrive - still got both and all the games as well, although I have SD interfaces for both! :)
Remember seeing it previewed in Amstrad Action.. The problem is by 1990 those of us that were still using our 8-bit machines for gaming were probably not the ones able to afford CD players.
CD players became very cheap, Amstrad Argos was 120 pound sterlings, after 1986 even cheaper, family set was 300 incl CD and all... Only the PC was too fancy, some C64 too, Vic20 ??? mad times, Electron for 100 pound in 1984, with german book, lol ! We hated Amstrad and Argos here ! Sony, National, Yamaha !
I'm impressed they were able to make that tape loader resident with such a wide range of games. I would have thought no matter where they stored it in RAM, some of the games would have overwritten it. And how would the code for the QUIT key sequence continue to be executed while those games are running? Pretty much every game I've ever disassembled and examined (admittedly, mostly on the C64) overwrites the interrupt vectors and provides its own keyscan routine, which would disable a resident program like this. My only guess is that Codemasters went through and patched all these games to play nice with the loader. Quite a bit of work!
This has blown my mind! How did I never know about this? I feel like someone has gone back in time, introduced this in 1989 and I’m the only one on the original timeline where it didn’t exist... Excellent video btw, your enthusiasm was infectious!
Similar to loading "tapes" from smartphones these days, but decades ago! Same principle! There is just something so cool about anachronisms, seeing older equipment working with newer technology for which it was not designed, like this, and like hooking up those WiFi32-style "modems" to put older machines on wireless networks, SD adapters, etc. Good show, as always, man!
speccy/zx81 users who were into electronics too were building "crash loaders" in fact there was a niche fanzine, mine was based on a reel to reel deck, basically you record at one speed and load in at a faster one. and it works(sometimes), its not the same as this but mine would load the128k version of kwik snax in 2mins, which was great and about a 3rd the time the cassette took.
My mate at school had a Spectrum 48k and I was always around his house playing games such as: Knightlore, Jet Set Willy and Airwolf. It's crazy how far technology has advanced over the years. I still game to this day using my Gtx 1070Ti. I do like watching these kind of videos however and appreciate you making this one, thanks for the nostalgia trip.
2:25 Common practice to put 48k/128k to help indicate that the game was at least tested with the 128k. Early days, older 48k software sometimes had compatability issues with the 128k models, and some games were later fixed and reissued with the packaging updated to reflect that new compatability. And eventually it just kind of became the standard to list the all the models it worked with. 5:05 Should use the DivMMC to load an image of the CD loader tape
@Goliat eXperience 16k to 48k maybe? Sinclair sold the chips if you wanted to solder them in yourself or you could send it to them and they would upgrade it for a fee iirc.
Never seen this boxset before. Got some really nice games and its nice to see other versions of them, as ive played most of them on C64. I will get a Spectrum one day. Nice video Neil.
I was looking forward to seeing the loading screens appear incrementally and comparing that to the tape --- but they don't! Without that, loading seems like a very soulless experience. It looked really cool on the Microdrive.
Oh boy. I had Fruit Simulator on my +3 back in the day and I had great fun out of it. So much so I decided to write my own BASIC program of a fruit machine myself. However because I didn't know machine code or advanced user graphics usage, my "fruit" were limited to the initial letters of each fruit with different colours for different fruit, so you could distinguish between a yellow L representing a lemon, and a green L representing a lime. It had 4 reels to it and at first used RNG when rotating the reels, making a winning line a rare bit of random luck. Later I figured out how to use the DATA commend to program in 4 reels each with a preset 25 fruits in them. That allowed better working of the nudge and hold features in my game. Personally though, my favourite games for the Speccy were Advanced Pinball Simulator. It was fairly good in it's ball physics, but in the 48K version of the game, once the game finished loading you could hear "Advanced Pinball Simulator" spoken from the built-in speaker. It wasn't read from the tape. The game had a tiny bit of speech synthesis in it. How they fit it into 48K of RAM still bewilders me today, but it was awesome. My other favourite game was Hard Drivin'. A 3D racing game using the Freescape engine to render the world. Totally silent on the 48K version but had sound on the 128K versions.
That's a blast from the past :) I was working at Codemasters when this thing was released and at the time I thought it was a nifty technical achievement (mainly the speed of the loading) but a bit late to the party to make any real impact - I'd already had an Amiga for about a year, and the 8-bits were already looking "retro." I certainly gave it a spin, out of sheer curiosity, but I suspect I wouldn't have been curious enough to hand over 20 notes for it! As you say, it was an odd pitch: you needed a CD player, which was still an expensive and aspirational item for most people back then, but the pack was for a cheapjack computer that was already past its best-before date, and the included games were a pretty uninspiring bunch of old-ish budget titles. A curious mixture of luxury and slumming it. Anyone who was flash enough to have a CD player in 1989 would probably already have gone 16-bit by then, so it was never clear to me who this thing was actually supposed to be for. What it really needed was a killer USP to make it desirable - either the Codies' entire back-catalogue on a single CD ("Wow! Amazing!" - David Darling) or some epic new multi-load Dizzy game with the fast loading making the CD version clearly the optimal way to play.
I wonder why they didn’t just put the boot loader onto the CD and an extra cable. The boot loader wouldn’t be compressed like the games, but it could still be loaded directly from the CD to the audio jack.
Interesting Video. I think Codemasters should have made a Spectrum expansion with 2 joystick ports, extended ROM for the fast loader and CD cable built in. That would have allowed them to use it for single games on CD too, and also license it out to companies who were making the big popular 128K games that took a long time to load.
Damn I remember this! My parents got this for me back in the day (about 6 months when it first came out.) I had a portable CD player then, and used that. Mine was second-hand and came complete with a kempston joystick interface in the box which, I never realised until now, wasn't part of the original box. It was amazing to me to see games load so fast and no, "R-Tape loading error," messages, either. Disappointed you didn't use a TV (on channel 36 (ish) of course,) in the demo. Oh well. Thank you cave-dweller for the memory flashback!
the background music in your videos is always a pleasure to hear.. i'd love to own a rubber key speccy again.. *wistfully remembers being nine years old and playing bombjack*
Dude, that was a tech "nibble"? Loved it :-D saving FIVE whole minutes when loading a game sounds impressive, or a 700% speed increase, really puts things in perspective ; the bloopers were fun too hahaha. About the "CD player was a luxury" part, I suspect you addressed it very well earlier in the video when you said one could plug their Speccy into dad's hi-fi system. All in all, sounds like a good deal for the loading times alone, even more if your games library wasn't big beforehand :-)
Loading speed was tied to how long I played (play) games. When I had to wait 5+ minutes for a game to load I would usually give it a good go and play for quite a while. Now if I load something in seconds if I’m not hooked in a couple of minutes I usually try something else.
I bought my Amiga 500 in 1989 and the games for that blew away anything the spectrum could do. People that were into computers had either moved to Atari ST or Amiga by 1990. It helped that I had an income to be able to afford it as my parents probably wouldn't have been willing to pay out the £425 for it (400 for the Amiga and £25 for the TV modulator).
When I saw it I thought it was just a one-to-one audio reproduction of a cassette tape, I like the fact that they put the effort in to allow the games to load quicker. I want to understand the technology behind that - and how they achieved it via a joystick interface!
Really interesting episode this Neil, thanks. Lovely to see BMX Simulator in your top 3. I lost endless hours to that in my youth, a brilliant game. I couldn't believe it was £2.99 when other shocking games were being dropped at £7.99. Good old Codemasters 👍
I just took a break from playing Road Rash on my 3DO Blaster to watch this video only for you to mention Road Rash. Had a mate who had this Codemasters CD. Always wondered why they didn't put the loader on track 1 as a convenient alternative to the tape. Wasn't it just the +2 that was missing the audio input socket?
A CD compilation has already been done for the MSX but CD readers where rare at the time and expensive. No tape inside the CD was used in audio mode directly as was the tape.
I am impressed! You really are the MacGyver of retro gaming. If I may I would really love if you can make a video about MSX flash carts with SD card readers one day.
Fascinating! I have a 48K, but I've never heard of this. You didn't mention one thing though: _why_ does it use the joystick port? It's still audio, why wouldn't the audio-in port be the best way to receive audio from a CD?
The CD waveform had an interesting wobble to it. Kind of like an AM carrier signal. I couldn't see that in the tape version.You mentioned you asked A. Oliver about the loader. Could he shed a bit more light on how the encoding works?
The biggest oversight with this release was the fact they didn’t include the loader on the CD itself. They obviously shot for the lowest common denominator. The +2 machines didn’t have an audio input port, so loading from an external audio source was out of the question. At the same time, most 48K/128K owners probably had a third-party joystick interface of some sort, and so could take advantage of the new loading format. Ironically, if Code Masters had put a slightly modified version of the loader on the CD (it only needs to read from the Spectrum’s standard audio port instead of a joystick port), all games could have been loaded from a CD using a standard audio cable-no need for a cassette at all. It really wouldn’t have cost Code Masters a single penny more to do that. Oh, well.
Except no one who owned a Speccy in 1990 had a CD player in the same room, if at all. We couldn't afford a CD player until 1993. Households that could afford a CD player back then would almost certainly have moved on from the humble Spectrum for their kids to the 16-bit micros. It was a neat idea but was in no way going to be a big seller. Plus, you were stuck with those games.
I'm curious why the loader wasn't also included on the CD in the regular Speccy cassette format, to avoid booting from cassette. It would require the user to swap audio cables on the CD player, a bit of a hassle, but not really worse than the hassle of loading from tape. They could even provide a single cable with both the 9-pin connector and the typical "ear" connector, with a switch if necessary to easily switch between the two outputs. But that would probably be more costly to make than just including the cassette. And perhaps that would also be more error prone, as the user would have to guess at the CD volume settings for the loader, without the benefit of the volume test. So maybe I answered my own question :)
Nice presentation, but I have two questions: -Why didn' t they include the normal-speed program on the CD, along with the cassette, so you could use that instead, when you have found the correct volume. -Is there a TZX image of the tape and a CUE/BIN of the actual CD, for us to download them?
I just love watching these videos of ZX spectrum to hear the euro guys say "ZED HEX" spectrum. Or the really heavier accent in choice lands "ZED HEX" Spectwum. The r's in some words become W sounds.
In British English R sounds are either made by rounding off the W phoneme, or rounding off the L phoneme, depending on your local accent. Of course the W is more pronounced in some people than others, but everyone with particular regional accents does it.
Hi RMC... The original *'Grand Prix'* was coined by a classmate of mine called *Melissa Wilks* on a live Saturday morning Children's show. We both attended Gatehouse School in Sewardstone Road, Hackney at the time and it was as hilarious as it was innocently scandalous at the time. PS, Melissa also thought me how to smoke. Thanks M x
That damnable Seal on ATV was the bain of my life as a youth, honourable mentions for me on the Speccy were Combat School, Barbarian and Tir na Nog, Dun Darach and Marsport, Way of the Exploding Fist, Bruce Lee and Eddie kidds Jump challenge.
God, I had that. I worked in a computer shop so got it at a big discount given it was £20. It was relatively reliable attached to my Laskys own brand CD player. I remember being impressed by the ability to load relatively quickly from CD, but less impressed with some of the CodeMasters filler. I think I still have the thing somewhere!
I can clearly remember Amstrad Action ran a cover story about this, with a CD in place of the sun breaking through the clouds. The thing is, in 1990 I was earning £5 a week from my paper round, which, after paying back the shopkeeper for the Mars Bars I'd got on tick that week, and for my copy of Quest, left me about £100 short of the cost of a £100 CD player.
I had Spectrum cassetes with alternate "compressed" games on the tape - looks like, its used similar way to load games (with built-in loader) - way faster than normal. Its was made by local Russian coders here, in Russia. Each cassete had more games on it, but requires good tape player to load without errors. I still have such cassetes somewhere, but I not sure about their current state - aside from not having any cassete player to check them anyway.
When buying these some don't work cause of how old they are, the adapter does not work, I have the Commodore 64 version and it does not load, it never has but I did paid £21 for it on eBay, its up on eBay at the moment and over £200, I am still glad I got it because its part of history of Codemasters and the C64, the ZX version was better, that because that was made by the Oliver twins, I would not mind a version for that, I do have a ZX Spectrum too, or a copy of its CD, you can download the Cassette as a tap, the loader. In 1989 most users didn't have a CD player(I didn't), they were to expansive so the same kind of problem as buying a disk drive then, and the other problem is your not going to like all the games on it. I have the Rainbow Arts 1st CD-Edition too on the C64, that came out at the same time, that works fine, but it came out a few months the Codemasters CD, they both say on them 1989. Cause my Codemasters CD Adapter didn't work(I need to fix it) I took my adapter apart, it has epoxy that cover the amplifier board, this is my adapter... its on cpc site.. www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/File:Inside_the_adapter.jpg I did post about it on Lemon64 years ago but the site has been attacked by hackers so its down at the moment, Its here... the webcache version, I sheared my version as a wav file because I couldn't copy its CD with CD copy software... webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0mgUuKEJ00oJ:www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php%3Ft%3D59620
On the box it says 48k with Kempston... Maybe the cable was made just for that and +2 Sinclair port (which obviously has different pinout from Interface 2)?
When it came out I briefly flirted with the idea of buying it but three problems stopped me: I wasn't convinced any other software would come out on it. The only software on it was Codemasters budget games. I had a +3, so not much advantage.
Wow I'd never seen this before. What a great idea, and in a way does put the spectrum/c64 as an early computer that would work with a CDROM drive. I do get the fast load idea. But was the cost worth it? Having a joystick adapter, having to run a loader program on cassette, and then swapping loader out with an actual joystick. I cant help but wonder if this would have done better if it had just been a straight load via the casette input. Maybe even with that they could get away with some faster loading. (i know i can increase the bitrate of a wav file on audacity to an extent and pump it into the speccy and it'll load it). The pack could have been cheaper without needing the adapter or cost of the loader. Also Im curious to know what the cd sounded like through speakers. Was it a similar sound to the tape?
I'm actually impressed by this and surprised it didn't have more success. 30 games for under a quid each, plus they load in seconds? Even with the iffy quality of some of the games and the limited install base of CD players at the time I can't see why this wasn't a no-brainer for a lot of people. The only thing I can think of is that, as someone said in another comment, by 1989 families rich enough to own a CD player had probably already upgraded to a games console or a 16-bit computer and therefore had no need of a Spectrum compilation.
I am curious as to exactly why loading via the joystick port was faster? It seems like the optimized loader could have been the first track on the CD and subsequent tracks would still be able to take advantage of the audio compression used. It would be cool to dig into whether the same audio compression could have been used over the audio port and skip the extra cable.
It would be interesting to see a comparison of the raw data transfer speed between this method, the cassette tape and a regular CD-ROM (which is 150 kB/s at single-speed)...
I remember seeing this advertised in Crash when it was first released, but it wasn't for me, as I didn't get a CD player until 1996, long after I got rid of my Spectrum.
Surely you could sample the fast tape loader and burn it as a standard CD audio track and load it from CD, or if you make a backup put it as the first track, or back up your tapes to normal speed CD audio and load directly from cd
This looks like a great idea but seams weird that they didn't add the loader as the first track of the CD. I guess it was more aimed at the +2 owners who didn't have a sound in port for the loader.
I have just realised something. In 1990 I was 37, had never used a computer (not until 1994) and, not being a teenage boy, thought computer games were a silly waste of time. You guys would have simply been annoying teenagers to me but I can now see the world you experienced :-) Isn't it funny what 30 years can do? Now I am thinking of playing some of them just for kicks. Never too late I say. Cheers!
Honestly, from a money saving standpoint.. The biggest surprise is that CodeMasters didn't include the audio track for the cassette loader program on the CD itself so you would have to dub that to cassette first before even thinking about loading games.
You could have loaded it directly from the CD then, the problem was they were lazy, since the tape was needed for the +2 Spectrum, which lacked an audio input, they didn't include the loader on the CD as well
Considering how notoriously slow the C64 floppy drive was, I wonder how that version of the CD compared to loading off floppies? While the floppy was faster than tape, there's a good reason "fast load" apps were all the rage on the C64.
Perhaps the twins could open source the gadget and the software that drives it for homebrew.. I am sure alot of retro'ers would like to backup their games onto CD and enjoy them that way .. Multi loaders would be an interessting challenge as many of them used fast loaders etc etc to speed up the loading process.
Of all the games to pick you pick a controversial one and on top of that you use an arch-enemies clock! ;) Never knew this speedy fast device existed! How many games packs existed, was it just the one?
Local craftsmen and global delivery makes NO SENSE!?? I can't let this go any longer @RetroManCave, what the heck!? Everything is made locally somewhere, and most stuff can be delivered globally these days, Covid notwithstanding. Sense makes none. Fun video, as usual, great content, big fan, blah blah :P
Quite an interesting idea if there were a better selection of games but by the time it came out I was moving on to the Amiga. I recon that multi load games would have benefited from something like this.
I suspect what they would have done on the cancelled CPC version, is have the main program be the loader and each track be the game data. That way the track cuts out all the Speedlock delays/can be compressed and improves the baud rate! Without the loader, the track has no load mechanism to play a track to tape...
Can you try use audacity to convert standard tape games into the compressed format and burn them on a CD? I wonder how many games would fit on a 700MB CD without duplications. How many CDs to have entire ZX Spectrum library on CDs? Too bad I never heard of it back then, I would love it. I used VHS and some interface to write computer data to VHS tapes so yea this stuff was made for me.
2:26 does the disc say made in UK by PDO? That's disc bronzing (rot) you've got there. You're lucky it plays, many of my CDs now have errors and are unplayable. 7:42 Perhaps when the Sinclair option is selected, it's set for the non-standard Amstrad joystick ports of the +2 and +3?
I was going to comment the same thing - the Interface 2 and the +2/+3 ports are software compatible, but good old Amstrad changed the pinout of the ports to try and force people to buy the SJS-1 joystick. So the joystick manufacturers just did that grey-and-black-plugs thing.
@@pablorai769 Yes but the adapter would need to be reversed? As the CD is set for the Amstrad standard of +2 and +3, not atari. Normally +2 owners would have an adapter to convert the Atari standard joysticks to their machine. But with 48K owners the Kempston interface was the most popular. I think after a certain year, nearly all aftermarket joystick interfaces were Kempston compatble? So the CD's "sinclair" option shoud have only affected a few interface II spectrum owners by 1990.
For those interested in a bit more technical detail on how this worked, I wrote an article for the Spectrum For Everyone website a few years ago that goes into more detail: spectrumforeveryone.com/2017/06/inside-codemasters-cd-games-pack/
Try copying it to a Minidisc.Youd be able to save to it as well,and you might be able to use the extended length playback (LP,LP2,LP4) nice experiment?
Did anyone actually buy this thing? Let me know if you have any memories of seeing this in the shops or if you bought it, and what CD player did you hook it up to? As always if you love what we do in The Cave and would like to support the channel then head on over to patreon.com/retromancave - Thank you for your support. Neil - RMC
Hi Neil.
Never heard about the CD 8bit home computer stuff until you put it in your other video.
Fortunately a TurboDuo console (PCE Duo USA version) - grey import - was my first CD based gaming gear - good times and many HuCards are still among my collection today :-)
That poor old CDRom Rom... fancy it being subjected to 'Spectrum' data lol
The only reason I didn't ever get this was because I couldn't afford a CD player. By the time I did own one, I had brought a disk drive and forgot about the concept
My best mate had a Speccy and his parents had a (very expensive) Pioneer stereo stack system too, and the 6 disc CD changer in it also had a single caddy cartridge so the Codemasters CD he got for his birthday in November went in there. He had to use a converter on the joystick jack lead, as that Pioneer system used the larger (older?) headphone jack standard. As you've identified in your video, it wasn't usual to have a CD player at that time- my parents certainly didn't, and I was therefore happy to spend time around his place with all his stuff, the lucky sod! But I remember we were around 13/14 years old at the time, and were more fascinated by the technology side of things, like faster loading and the fact that the loader stayed resident in memory, rather than the actual games themselves. We're both working in IT as adults, you'd never guess would you...!
Yep, I did, still got it as well in a box in the loft along with the rest of my Spectrum games! I had a ZX Spectrum +3 (which I still have and use with a Zaxon SD interface), I think I got the CD Games Pack for a birthday or Christmas, I can't remember now. The only place in the house I could use it was in the living room, as that's where we had a Sanyo DCX891 (just found that model number!) all in one CD stack system (still got that as well!) that my parents had bought not long before along with the Mitsubishi 21" Nicam Stereo Fastext TV. I used to get the old TV from the living room when it was replaced so I had the 20" colour TV (that the Mitsubishi had replaced) in my bedroom, which was great, especially when I later got a NES and later still a Megadrive - still got both and all the games as well, although I have SD interfaces for both! :)
You do know the Sinclair Spectrum 128k exists right? Before Alan Sugar took over...
Remember seeing it previewed in Amstrad Action.. The problem is by 1990 those of us that were still using our 8-bit machines for gaming were probably not the ones able to afford CD players.
Very true!
Yes I remember seeing it advertised at the time but I didn't have a cd player so I never bought it for my spectrum+2
Not only that but we probably had most of those games already
CD players became very cheap, Amstrad Argos was 120 pound sterlings, after 1986 even cheaper, family set was 300 incl CD and all...
Only the PC was too fancy, some C64 too, Vic20 ??? mad times, Electron for 100 pound in 1984, with german book, lol !
We hated Amstrad and Argos here ! Sony, National, Yamaha !
I'm impressed they were able to make that tape loader resident with such a wide range of games. I would have thought no matter where they stored it in RAM, some of the games would have overwritten it. And how would the code for the QUIT key sequence continue to be executed while those games are running? Pretty much every game I've ever disassembled and examined (admittedly, mostly on the C64) overwrites the interrupt vectors and provides its own keyscan routine, which would disable a resident program like this. My only guess is that Codemasters went through and patched all these games to play nice with the loader. Quite a bit of work!
This has blown my mind!
How did I never know about this?
I feel like someone has gone back in time, introduced this in 1989 and I’m the only one on the original timeline where it didn’t exist...
Excellent video btw, your enthusiasm was infectious!
Similar to loading "tapes" from smartphones these days, but decades ago! Same principle! There is just something so cool about anachronisms, seeing older equipment working with newer technology for which it was not designed, like this, and like hooking up those WiFi32-style "modems" to put older machines on wireless networks, SD adapters, etc. Good show, as always, man!
speccy/zx81 users who were into electronics too were building "crash loaders" in fact there was a niche fanzine, mine was based on a reel to reel deck, basically you record at one speed and load in at a faster one.
and it works(sometimes), its not the same as this but mine would load the128k version of kwik snax in 2mins, which was great and about a 3rd the time the cassette took.
I had to like this just cause the setup looks so awesome, and true for the period, how I wish I was 8 again
Love you’re videos it’s like stepping back in gaming time
Thanks Allan
My mate at school had a Spectrum 48k and I was always around his house playing games such as: Knightlore, Jet Set Willy and Airwolf. It's crazy how far technology has advanced over the years. I still game to this day using my Gtx 1070Ti. I do like watching these kind of videos however and appreciate you making this one, thanks for the nostalgia trip.
I am in eternal awe of the Speccy visual charm, it aged uniquely and I sat and smiled watching the clips of the games. What a beaut.
Came for the retro gaming, stayed for the CD-rom-rom🤘
2:25 Common practice to put 48k/128k to help indicate that the game was at least tested with the 128k. Early days, older 48k software sometimes had compatability issues with the 128k models, and some games were later fixed and reissued with the packaging updated to reflect that new compatability. And eventually it just kind of became the standard to list the all the models it worked with.
5:05 Should use the DivMMC to load an image of the CD loader tape
....well, until someone found out you just type USR 0 in 128K basic...
absolutely mind blowing. I would have loved this on C64.
Only ever had the temperamental tapes.
Still got my Spectrum with the official memory upgrade and a DKTronics keyboard.
@Goliat eXperience 16k to 48k maybe? Sinclair sold the chips if you wanted to solder them in yourself or you could send it to them and they would upgrade it for a fee iirc.
Never seen this boxset before. Got some really nice games and its nice to see other versions of them, as ive played most of them on C64. I will get a Spectrum one day. Nice video Neil.
I was looking forward to seeing the loading screens appear incrementally and comparing that to the tape --- but they don't! Without that, loading seems like a very soulless experience. It looked really cool on the Microdrive.
🔥Great tunes at 4.18 and 14.35. Tough to go from seeing you nearly everyday back to just once in a while. 😭
I like this monster you created !
Congratulations, my favourite retro computing channel for sure.
Thanks Anton
Seeing those Codemasters games sure brought back some memories!
Oh boy. I had Fruit Simulator on my +3 back in the day and I had great fun out of it. So much so I decided to write my own BASIC program of a fruit machine myself. However because I didn't know machine code or advanced user graphics usage, my "fruit" were limited to the initial letters of each fruit with different colours for different fruit, so you could distinguish between a yellow L representing a lemon, and a green L representing a lime. It had 4 reels to it and at first used RNG when rotating the reels, making a winning line a rare bit of random luck. Later I figured out how to use the DATA commend to program in 4 reels each with a preset 25 fruits in them. That allowed better working of the nudge and hold features in my game.
Personally though, my favourite games for the Speccy were Advanced Pinball Simulator. It was fairly good in it's ball physics, but in the 48K version of the game, once the game finished loading you could hear "Advanced Pinball Simulator" spoken from the built-in speaker. It wasn't read from the tape. The game had a tiny bit of speech synthesis in it. How they fit it into 48K of RAM still bewilders me today, but it was awesome. My other favourite game was Hard Drivin'. A 3D racing game using the Freescape engine to render the world. Totally silent on the 48K version but had sound on the 128K versions.
Some say he was in a Spectrum game, all we know is he's called The Stig...
... had to do the math on whether it was worth a purchase, based on the games you already had. So, it was the Humble Bundle of the 1980s.
That's a blast from the past :) I was working at Codemasters when this thing was released and at the time I thought it was a nifty technical achievement (mainly the speed of the loading) but a bit late to the party to make any real impact - I'd already had an Amiga for about a year, and the 8-bits were already looking "retro."
I certainly gave it a spin, out of sheer curiosity, but I suspect I wouldn't have been curious enough to hand over 20 notes for it!
As you say, it was an odd pitch: you needed a CD player, which was still an expensive and aspirational item for most people back then, but the pack was for a cheapjack computer that was already past its best-before date, and the included games were a pretty uninspiring bunch of old-ish budget titles. A curious mixture of luxury and slumming it. Anyone who was flash enough to have a CD player in 1989 would probably already have gone 16-bit by then, so it was never clear to me who this thing was actually supposed to be for.
What it really needed was a killer USP to make it desirable - either the Codies' entire back-catalogue on a single CD ("Wow! Amazing!" - David Darling) or some epic new multi-load Dizzy game with the fast loading making the CD version clearly the optimal way to play.
I wonder why they didn’t just put the boot loader onto the CD and an extra cable. The boot loader wouldn’t be compressed like the games, but it could still be loaded directly from the CD to the audio jack.
They did release a black ROM ROM, it's the US TG16 CD drive! :)
Glad someone responded. I was about to mention the US version too.
Interesting Video. I think Codemasters should have made a Spectrum expansion with 2 joystick ports, extended ROM for the fast loader and CD cable built in. That would have allowed them to use it for single games on CD too, and also license it out to companies who were making the big popular 128K games that took a long time to load.
Brilliant solution that using CD tracks
Damn I remember this! My parents got this for me back in the day (about 6 months when it first came out.) I had a portable CD player then, and used that. Mine was second-hand and came complete with a kempston joystick interface in the box which, I never realised until now, wasn't part of the original box. It was amazing to me to see games load so fast and no, "R-Tape loading error," messages, either. Disappointed you didn't use a TV (on channel 36 (ish) of course,) in the demo. Oh well. Thank you cave-dweller for the memory flashback!
the background music in your videos is always a pleasure to hear..
i'd love to own a rubber key speccy again.. *wistfully remembers being nine years old and playing bombjack*
Dude, that was a tech "nibble"? Loved it :-D saving FIVE whole minutes when loading a game sounds impressive, or a 700% speed increase, really puts things in perspective ; the bloopers were fun too hahaha. About the "CD player was a luxury" part, I suspect you addressed it very well earlier in the video when you said one could plug their Speccy into dad's hi-fi system. All in all, sounds like a good deal for the loading times alone, even more if your games library wasn't big beforehand :-)
I thought I was watching and LGR oddware episode for a moment here!
I was just thinking that.
I never owned any of this stuff, so it is fascinating to see it in action.
Loading speed was tied to how long I played (play) games. When I had to wait 5+ minutes for a game to load I would usually give it a good go and play for quite a while. Now if I load something in seconds if I’m not hooked in a couple of minutes I usually try something else.
I bought my Amiga 500 in 1989 and the games for that blew away anything the spectrum could do. People that were into computers had either moved to Atari ST or Amiga by 1990. It helped that I had an income to be able to afford it as my parents probably wouldn't have been willing to pay out the £425 for it (400 for the Amiga and £25 for the TV modulator).
This is actually one of my favourite bits of tech on this channel so far. I would've used this tech loudly and proudly!
When I saw it I thought it was just a one-to-one audio reproduction of a cassette tape, I like the fact that they put the effort in to allow the games to load quicker. I want to understand the technology behind that - and how they achieved it via a joystick interface!
Really interesting episode this Neil, thanks. Lovely to see BMX Simulator in your top 3. I lost endless hours to that in my youth, a brilliant game. I couldn't believe it was £2.99 when other shocking games were being dropped at £7.99. Good old Codemasters 👍
Actually it was £1.99
I'm glad someone got it working well. We gave up back in the day, it never worked for us.
I just took a break from playing Road Rash on my 3DO Blaster to watch this video only for you to mention Road Rash.
Had a mate who had this Codemasters CD. Always wondered why they didn't put the loader on track 1 as a convenient alternative to the tape. Wasn't it just the +2 that was missing the audio input socket?
I don't remember this coming out, or seeing in the shops. I found this video quite mind blowing
A CD compilation has already been done for the MSX but CD readers where rare at the time and expensive. No tape inside the CD was used in audio mode directly as was the tape.
I am impressed! You really are the MacGyver of retro gaming. If I may I would really love if you can make a video about MSX flash carts with SD card readers one day.
Fascinating! I have a 48K, but I've never heard of this. You didn't mention one thing though: _why_ does it use the joystick port? It's still audio, why wouldn't the audio-in port be the best way to receive audio from a CD?
The CD waveform had an interesting wobble to it. Kind of like an AM carrier signal. I couldn't see that in the tape version.You mentioned you asked A. Oliver about the loader. Could he shed a bit more light on how the encoding works?
Using a console from 1988 to load games for a microcomputer from 1982 is a special kind of retro madness, and I dig it.
The biggest oversight with this release was the fact they didn’t include the loader on the CD itself. They obviously shot for the lowest common denominator. The +2 machines didn’t have an audio input port, so loading from an external audio source was out of the question. At the same time, most 48K/128K owners probably had a third-party joystick interface of some sort, and so could take advantage of the new loading format.
Ironically, if Code Masters had put a slightly modified version of the loader on the CD (it only needs to read from the Spectrum’s standard audio port instead of a joystick port), all games could have been loaded from a CD using a standard audio cable-no need for a cassette at all. It really wouldn’t have cost Code Masters a single penny more to do that. Oh, well.
Yes, you're right, though the loader can be the same as the tape version, no need for modifications, I think they were just lazy...
Except no one who owned a Speccy in 1990 had a CD player in the same room, if at all. We couldn't afford a CD player until 1993. Households that could afford a CD player back then would almost certainly have moved on from the humble Spectrum for their kids to the 16-bit micros. It was a neat idea but was in no way going to be a big seller. Plus, you were stuck with those games.
I'm curious why the loader wasn't also included on the CD in the regular Speccy cassette format, to avoid booting from cassette. It would require the user to swap audio cables on the CD player, a bit of a hassle, but not really worse than the hassle of loading from tape. They could even provide a single cable with both the 9-pin connector and the typical "ear" connector, with a switch if necessary to easily switch between the two outputs. But that would probably be more costly to make than just including the cassette. And perhaps that would also be more error prone, as the user would have to guess at the CD volume settings for the loader, without the benefit of the volume test. So maybe I answered my own question :)
Nice presentation, but I have two questions:
-Why didn' t they include the normal-speed program on the CD, along with the cassette, so you could use that instead, when you have found the correct volume.
-Is there a TZX image of the tape and a CUE/BIN of the actual CD, for us to download them?
I just love watching these videos of ZX spectrum to hear the euro guys say "ZED HEX" spectrum. Or the really heavier accent in choice lands "ZED HEX" Spectwum. The r's in some words become W sounds.
In British English R sounds are either made by rounding off the W phoneme, or rounding off the L phoneme, depending on your local accent. Of course the W is more pronounced in some people than others, but everyone with particular regional accents does it.
Hi RMC... The original *'Grand Prix'* was coined by a classmate of mine called *Melissa Wilks* on a live Saturday morning Children's show.
We both attended Gatehouse School in Sewardstone Road, Hackney at the time and it was as hilarious as it was innocently scandalous at the time.
PS, Melissa also thought me how to smoke. Thanks M x
Thanks M!
That damnable Seal on ATV was the bain of my life as a youth, honourable mentions for me on the Speccy were Combat School, Barbarian and Tir na Nog, Dun Darach and Marsport, Way of the Exploding Fist, Bruce Lee and Eddie kidds Jump challenge.
God, I had that. I worked in a computer shop so got it at a big discount given it was £20. It was relatively reliable attached to my Laskys own brand CD player. I remember being impressed by the ability to load relatively quickly from CD, but less impressed with some of the CodeMasters filler. I think I still have the thing somewhere!
I can clearly remember Amstrad Action ran a cover story about this, with a CD in place of the sun breaking through the clouds. The thing is, in 1990 I was earning £5 a week from my paper round, which, after paying back the shopkeeper for the Mars Bars I'd got on tick that week, and for my copy of Quest, left me about £100 short of the cost of a £100 CD player.
I had Spectrum cassetes with alternate "compressed" games on the tape - looks like, its used similar way to load games (with built-in loader) - way faster than normal. Its was made by local Russian coders here, in Russia. Each cassete had more games on it, but requires good tape player to load without errors.
I still have such cassetes somewhere, but I not sure about their current state - aside from not having any cassete player to check them anyway.
‘ I met him on a Monday and my heart stood still, cd rom rom rom, cd rom rom’
I come for the retro tech. I stay for the 303 bubbling away in the background
When buying these some don't work cause of how old they are, the adapter does not work, I have the Commodore 64 version and it does not load, it never has but I did paid £21 for it on eBay, its up on eBay at the moment and over £200, I am still glad I got it because its part of history of Codemasters and the C64, the ZX version was better, that because that was made by the Oliver twins, I would not mind a version for that, I do have a ZX Spectrum too, or a copy of its CD, you can download the Cassette as a tap, the loader.
In 1989 most users didn't have a CD player(I didn't), they were to expansive so the same kind of problem as buying a disk drive then, and the other problem is your not going to like all the games on it.
I have the Rainbow Arts 1st CD-Edition too on the C64, that came out at the same time, that works fine, but it came out a few months the Codemasters CD, they both say on them 1989.
Cause my Codemasters CD Adapter didn't work(I need to fix it) I took my adapter apart, it has epoxy that cover the amplifier board, this is my adapter... its on cpc site.. www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/File:Inside_the_adapter.jpg
I did post about it on Lemon64 years ago but the site has been attacked by hackers so its down at the moment, Its here... the webcache version, I sheared my version as a wav file because I couldn't copy its CD with CD copy software... webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0mgUuKEJ00oJ:www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php%3Ft%3D59620
Very exotic stuff from the era, thanks! I’ve missed some audio takes from the CD, I’m curious about how it sounds
Really fascinating stuff! I had no idea this existed! That's my kind of hodge-podged setup!
Amazing to see that there's not that much difference between ATV sim and the Trials games.
It's great to see a video about this.
On the box it says 48k with Kempston... Maybe the cable was made just for that and +2 Sinclair port (which obviously has different pinout from Interface 2)?
Honestly, they should have made the loader the first track and used a splitter for the audio cable.
The +2 Spectrum didn't have an audio input, so this was the only way to make it available to everyone
They could've included the loader on the CD as well, though, lazy people...
When it came out I briefly flirted with the idea of buying it but three problems stopped me:
I wasn't convinced any other software would come out on it.
The only software on it was Codemasters budget games.
I had a +3, so not much advantage.
Wow I'd never seen this before. What a great idea, and in a way does put the spectrum/c64 as an early computer that would work with a CDROM drive.
I do get the fast load idea. But was the cost worth it? Having a joystick adapter, having to run a loader program on cassette, and then swapping loader out with an actual joystick. I cant help but wonder if this would have done better if it had just been a straight load via the casette input. Maybe even with that they could get away with some faster loading. (i know i can increase the bitrate of a wav file on audacity to an extent and pump it into the speccy and it'll load it). The pack could have been cheaper without needing the adapter or cost of the loader.
Also Im curious to know what the cd sounded like through speakers. Was it a similar sound to the tape?
I'm actually impressed by this and surprised it didn't have more success. 30 games for under a quid each, plus they load in seconds? Even with the iffy quality of some of the games and the limited install base of CD players at the time I can't see why this wasn't a no-brainer for a lot of people. The only thing I can think of is that, as someone said in another comment, by 1989 families rich enough to own a CD player had probably already upgraded to a games console or a 16-bit computer and therefore had no need of a Spectrum compilation.
I am curious as to exactly why loading via the joystick port was faster? It seems like the optimized loader could have been the first track on the CD and subsequent tracks would still be able to take advantage of the audio compression used. It would be cool to dig into whether the same audio compression could have been used over the audio port and skip the extra cable.
It would be interesting to see a comparison of the raw data transfer speed between this method, the cassette tape and a regular CD-ROM (which is 150 kB/s at single-speed)...
Great video, what a find.
It was released in 1989, not 1982, some people misread the title
That's correct, the micro was released in 1982
That Computape brand cassette gave me a pang of nostalgia! Not seen one of those in years.
I remember seeing this advertised in Crash when it was first released, but it wasn't for me, as I didn't get a CD player until 1996, long after I got rid of my Spectrum.
Produced by Dick Darling? Great name, I’m sure his school friends loved it!
Surely you could sample the fast tape loader and burn it as a standard CD audio track and load it from CD, or if you make a backup put it as the first track, or back up your tapes to normal speed CD audio and load directly from cd
This looks like a great idea but seams weird that they didn't add the loader as the first track of the CD. I guess it was more aimed at the +2 owners who didn't have a sound in port for the loader.
I have just realised something. In 1990 I was 37, had never used a computer (not until 1994) and, not being a teenage boy, thought computer games were a silly waste of time. You guys would have simply been annoying teenagers to me but I can now see the world you experienced :-) Isn't it funny what 30 years can do? Now I am thinking of playing some of them just for kicks. Never too late I say. Cheers!
Ah, the good old Philips CM8833. Best "bang for the buck" retrogaming RGB monitor out there, in my opinion.
Honestly, from a money saving standpoint.. The biggest surprise is that CodeMasters didn't include the audio track for the cassette loader program on the CD itself so you would have to dub that to cassette first before even thinking about loading games.
You could have loaded it directly from the CD then, the problem was they were lazy, since the tape was needed for the +2 Spectrum, which lacked an audio input, they didn't include the loader on the CD as well
Impressive the recite is still readable still :D
Considering how notoriously slow the C64 floppy drive was, I wonder how that version of the CD compared to loading off floppies? While the floppy was faster than tape, there's a good reason "fast load" apps were all the rage on the C64.
Perhaps the twins could open source the gadget and the software that drives it for homebrew.. I am sure alot of retro'ers would like to backup their games onto CD and enjoy them that way .. Multi loaders would be an interessting challenge as many of them used fast loaders etc etc to speed up the loading process.
Wonderful as always.
Of all the games to pick you pick a controversial one and on top of that you use an arch-enemies clock! ;) Never knew this speedy fast device existed! How many games packs existed, was it just the one?
Local craftsmen and global delivery makes NO SENSE!?? I can't let this go any longer @RetroManCave, what the heck!? Everything is made locally somewhere, and most stuff can be delivered globally these days, Covid notwithstanding. Sense makes none.
Fun video, as usual, great content, big fan, blah blah :P
This was a super cool setup!
I had atv simulator back in the day
Pair it with a Sony D50 Discman from 1984 😍
It's a shame the boxart looks more like a CD cleaning set.
I do wonder why they didn't include the loader as audio track 1. It would mean swapping cables, but would be a nice backup.
Amazing!, I had never heard of that system.
Quite an interesting idea if there were a better selection of games but by the time it came out I was moving on to the Amiga. I recon that multi load games would have benefited from something like this.
I suspect what they would have done on the cancelled CPC version, is have the main program be the loader and each track be the game data. That way the track cuts out all the Speedlock delays/can be compressed and improves the baud rate! Without the loader, the track has no load mechanism to play a track to tape...
- Tried compressing a CPC game yesterday, by using Audacity, but the protection causes it to fail...
This feels a bit like putting in a really impressive hood scoop on a 1980s dodge colt.
This is oooooold school! Great stuff!
Can you try use audacity to convert standard tape games into the compressed format and burn them on a CD? I wonder how many games would fit on a 700MB CD without duplications. How many CDs to have entire ZX Spectrum library on CDs?
Too bad I never heard of it back then, I would love it. I used VHS and some interface to write computer data to VHS tapes so yea this stuff was made for me.
2:26 does the disc say made in UK by PDO? That's disc bronzing (rot) you've got there. You're lucky it plays, many of my CDs now have errors and are unplayable. 7:42 Perhaps when the Sinclair option is selected, it's set for the non-standard Amstrad joystick ports of the +2 and +3?
If that's the case, a simple adapter would solve the problem, it'd be interesting to try it
I was going to comment the same thing - the Interface 2 and the +2/+3 ports are software compatible, but good old Amstrad changed the pinout of the ports to try and force people to buy the SJS-1 joystick. So the joystick manufacturers just did that grey-and-black-plugs thing.
@@pablorai769 Yes but the adapter would need to be reversed? As the CD is set for the Amstrad standard of +2 and +3, not atari. Normally +2 owners would have an adapter to convert the Atari standard joysticks to their machine. But with 48K owners the Kempston interface was the most popular. I think after a certain year, nearly all aftermarket joystick interfaces were Kempston compatble? So the CD's "sinclair" option shoud have only affected a few interface II spectrum owners by 1990.
It'd have to be the reverse of the commercially available adapter, a simple soldering job
For those interested in a bit more technical detail on how this worked, I wrote an article for the Spectrum For Everyone website a few years ago that goes into more detail:
spectrumforeveryone.com/2017/06/inside-codemasters-cd-games-pack/
If you could afford all that at the time, you could probably afford an Amiga.
Good point!
That CD looks like it's going through what is known as disc bronzing, only happened on discs made by PDO...
Try copying it to a Minidisc.Youd be able to save to it as well,and you might be able to use the extended length playback (LP,LP2,LP4) nice experiment?
MDLP4 would give 320mins on one disk...
Never knew about this until I saw your first video about this, a pity it never took off.