Another program on a vinyl, with a hidden ZX Spectrum demo in Brainfuel 2, an English vinyl.
Instead of repeating all the previous articles each time, I’ll refer you to the dedicated page, which explains what I do with vinyl records and lists all the pages containing programs, explanations, etc.
The presence of data on this vinyl is not well known. Discogs doesn’t indicate it, and I haven’t found any reference on the Net. So, you might be wondering how I found it? Easy, in the comments on the reference page about vinyl records containing data. Well, in a copy of the page: the comments from the current page don’t appear…
I stumbled upon this message, and I found the record for cheap.
Ha! Great read. My friend just passed me this link. I released a dance record in the mid nineties with spectrum data on it. And up until now I was unaware that anyone else had included promotional Spectrum data on vinyl (I even promoted it as ‘the first’ at the time). The record was BrainFuel 2 on PH1 Records, I used to program the Speccy when I was very young, then a number of years later I released the BrainFuel series. ‘multimedia’ was the buzz word of the time so I decided to dust off my old spectrum manual and make a “vinyl multimedia” release.
My spectrum programing was pretty crap, and all it was (as far as i remember) was a promotion for the next BrainFuel release.
A surprising amount of people took the effort of loading it into their old Spectrums though, I felt a bit embarrassed as I kinda never thought anyone would bother, and so never put much effort into it as I could.
I thought about doing a sequel with modem data, but i’m not sure it’s technically possible due to the information handshaking that goes on, anyone?
At the end of the second side, there are a few seconds of audio, for ZX Spectrum. Apart from the fact that the author indicates it, it’s quite recognizable, with the structure in several segments. I had a bit of trouble cleanly retrieving the data: with the line input, the level was too low, with the microphone input, a bit too high. But by cleaning the record and playing with the level using Audacity, at some point, it worked. As explained in this topic, I used TZXWAV, a devilishly efficient command-line tool with data for ZX Spectrum.
Both areas are clearly visible
The program is rather short (837 bytes), it just displays the name of the record, with a moving message and an address. The URL no longer exists and hasn’t been saved, but it implies that the record probably dates from the mid-nineties. After about thirty seconds, the screen fills with colored squares.
