Was there ever a game the used a video tape?

Tornadoboy

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Just curious.

The question came to me when I heard that believe it or not one company still making VCRs and only now stopped production, I don't know the name.

I know there have been games that used 8-tracks, standard audio cassettes, an oddball smaller 8-track tape, an oddball mini-cassette for loading data (DECO system), and of course laser discs, but I've never heard of one that used a VHS or some other form of video tape.
 
Boulder Dash DECO?

Are you talking about the actual game info being read off the cassette? :confused:
 
I bet they were making them for people to watch movies or there old home movies on..VHS has way to slow access for a game I would say!
 
I think some of the older "driving" games used film, but I doubt it was VCR technology. Also, you have to remember that VCRs can't like "jump around" as they need to be rewinded or fast-forwarded. Would have been very difficult.
 
Likely none as video tape would be too slow, doesn't have random access and is slow to rewind.

How many games used cassette tape at all ? As far as I know:
DECO cassette system games
Pacific Novelty games: Thief, Shark Attack and NATO Defense (for dialogue)
Midway's Journey (for music)
Atari's Quiz Show
 
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Yeah VHS and Beta was poor technology for fast, repeated use, but that often isn't enough for someone to try to make use of something.

For example the DECO cassette system was a piss-poor idea, it relied on a physical cassette that was incredibly slow and would wear out fast to load data when for reasons I don't understand they didn't just incorporate it into the security dongle with solid state hardware like an EPROM, which is why work DECO stuff is incredibly rare.

And as a side note, somebody please, PLEASE come up with a solid state replacement for the DECO cassettes! :D
 
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The last VCR company is a Japanese company named Funai Electronics.

I wonder how many DECO cassette system games are unfortunately lost because they were on cassette tapes which have long degraded beyond recovery ?
 
Yeah it's sad, I see converted uprights and cocktails turn up every once in a while that are more or less impossible to restore and haven't seen a working one since the 80's, it's a system BADLY in need of replacement hardware upgrades and/or a multi adapter. There's a lot of shit games for it but there's a ton of good games too, like Peter Pepper's Ice Cream Factory, Angler Dangler, Manhattan, Flying Ball and such.
 
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Yeah VHS and Beta was poor technology for fast, repeated use, but that often isn't enough for someone to try to make use of something.

For example the DECO cassette system was a piss-poor idea, it relied on a physical cassette that was incredibly slow and would wear out fast to load data when for reasons I don't understand they didn't just incorporate it into the security dongle with solid state hardware like an EPROM, which is why work DECO stuff is incredibly rare.

And as a side note, somebody please, PLEASE come up with a solid state replacement for the DECO cassettes! :D

They did. There was a Deco Cassette multi cart produced in very limited numbers. I had one and sold it about 4 years ago.
 
The last VCR company is a Japanese company named Funai Electronics.

Bit of trivia: that's the same Funai who did the laserdisc video games InterStellar and Esh's Aurunmilla.

I wonder how many DECO cassette system games are unfortunately lost because they were on cassette tapes which have long degraded beyond recovery ?

I believe that there's only one that isn't accounted for (Explorer). The bigger problem is that you can have one of the tapes, but without the security dongle the tape is next to useless - even if the tape is dumped to an audio file there's no way to verify if the dump was good or not if you can't load and play the game.

Getting back to the original question for a moment: I can't think of any arcade games that used videocassettes, but the Action Max console was (AFAIK) the only one to have ever been VHS-based.
 
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Getting back to the original question for a moment: I can't think of any arcade games that used videocassettes, but the Action Max console was (AFAIK) the only one to have ever been VHS-based.

I never heard of the Action Max or the View-Master Interactive Vision until now. That Action Max sounds pretty bad.

I recall the Captain Power show and its related shoot-at-the-TV toy that's mentioned in the article. Note the article is incorrect, Captain Power was a live-action sci-fi show. Sadly I suspect that Captain Power toy was more fun for kids than the Action Max.

By the way, wasn't there an alternate version of Angler Dangler simply called Fishing ? Was that also on cassette tape or was it ROM-based ?
 
Sort of related to the Deco discussion, but there are still C64 fanatics using the old tapes. We never even had the tape player as it was bigger in Europe and the 1541 drive was pretty standard here.
 
Sort of related to the Deco discussion, but there are still C64 fanatics using the old tapes.

Same with the Atari crowd. Trivia: Atari's cassette drives used stereo tape heads, but only encoded data on one track. The other track could be used for audio playback through the TV speaker, and a few commercially-released titles (most notably foreign-language learning software) made use of this.
 
There was a Jukebox circa 1988 that had about 160 regular vinyl music selections and 20 music videos, running off a controlled Video Cassette Player. If you purchased a music video (1.00 instead of .25) you would get to hear a random record for as long as it took to cue the tape. I cannot remember the manufacturer otherwise I'd have more info. Pioneer? AMI? It wasn't Seeburg. It was in one of the bigger local arcades out here and got removed after just a few months, but the damn thing existed. I am not senile yet.
 
...And as a side note, somebody please, PLEASE come up with a solid state replacement for the DECO cassettes! :D

They did. There was a Deco Cassette multi cart produced in very limited numbers. I had one and sold it about 4 years ago.

And a newer, better Multi, from a prolific arcade dev is nearing completion now.:eek:

...I believe that there's only one that isn't accounted for (Explorer).

And that game has just recently been dumped and shared by me. :cool: A Japanese man has been feverishly dumping DECO games for preservation, and is now nearly finished with the known library.
.

WANTED!!! : DECO Cassette System Cages/PCB's - NEO GEO AES Joysticks - Amplifone M48AAW00X Tube+Yoke - MVS Magician Lord/The Super Spy - NeoSaveMasta
 
And a newer, better Multi, from a prolific arcade dev is nearing completion now.:eek:

And that game has just recently been dumped and shared by me. :cool: A Japanese man has been feverishly dumping DECO games for preservation, and is now nearly finished with the known library.
.
WANTED!!! : DECO Cassette System Cages/PCB's - NEO GEO AES Joysticks - Amplifone M48AAW00X Tube+Yoke - MVS Magician Lord/The Super Spy - NeoSaveMasta

All FANTASTIC NEWS! I hope Flashboy, The Tower and Ninja are among his collections, I've been wanting to try those!

Ironically I'm the one that finally came up with Angler Dangler, it survived only by the skin of it's teeth as it took 8 TRIES for the guy at MAME to get a good read of the data on the tape.

If there's an email waiting list for the multi put me on it! I'll probably buy a couple of the DECO multis depending on price, I've got a couple board sets.
 
And that game has just recently been dumped and shared by me. :cool:

Awesome news! Thank you for that, and I'm looking forward to seeing it soon. This has been a most-wanted title for me to see preserved for some years.

A Japanese man has been feverishly dumping DECO games for preservation, and is now nearly finished with the known library.

I'm really glad to hear that, and please also convey my thanks to him (assuming you are in contact with him). This was a very nifty system for its time, and it looked as though so much of its library was just flat-out lost forever. Great to find out that efforts to save these titles have produced serious results :)
 
Ironically I'm the one that finally came up with Angler Dangler, it survived only by the skin of it's teeth as it took 8 TRIES for the guy at MAME to get a good read of the data on the tape.

Oh, cool - and thanks for that :) I remember that story well from a few years back, and have to say that as pray-and-hope-it-works dumping goes that was one of the more impressive ones given the media involved.

If there's an email waiting list for the multi put me on it! I'll probably buy a couple of the DECO multis depending on price, I've got a couple board sets.

All this talk of the DECO multi is making me wonder if I shouldn't start thinking of acquiring a boardset. Hmm...
 
Oh, cool - and thanks for that :) I remember that story well from a few years back, and have to say that as pray-and-hope-it-works dumping goes that was one of the more impressive ones given the media involved.

It was near the top of my list of "missing" games I was waiting to be preserved, I used to play it on my TI 99/4a and when I found out it had been an arcade game I was anxious to try it. Fortunately it's Japanese release "Fishing" had already been found, but it seemed like it had a lot of bugs in it to me, the version of Angler Dangler I found fortunately was a very late revision and probably has a lot of fixes in it.

BTW speaking of that game I found an interesting way to crash it, if you manage to reel in your line all the way to the shore without hooking anything (something VERY tough to do) it'll continue all the way past the fisherman and keeping going towards the bottom of the screen over the shore with fish still chasing it, and the game will crash and lock up when it goes off screen.

All this talk of the DECO multi is making me wonder if I shouldn't start thinking of acquiring a boardset. Hmm...

Better start looking now as they're not easy to find, sadly I think they get junked a lot because the cassette decks are always bad and are a serious pain to fix, as are the tapes themselves. Again I don't know what they were thinking with that design, they already had a resin encased security dongle that they could have easily included the ROM data on in an EPROM, it would have been 100% more reliable and fast booting, the way it's designed now it can take over a minute to boot.
 
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