Mario From Disk To Tape

[@23Scadu]

A commercial FDS hex editor was not something I ever expected would exist. Very interesting.

[@chrismcovell]

Hey, amazing finding my TapeDump program randomly in one of your many great videos! Cheers, man!

[@bruce_just_]

Please please make a version to dump GameDoctor disks 😊😊

[@chrismcovell]

@@bruce_just_ I don't have a Game Doctor or example disks, nor do I have technical data on the format, so that's a little tough to pull off...

[@superzario1000]

very cool odd macgyver tech

[@pokepress]

I’m curious-would it be possible to make something like this for more advanced consoles? Would it be possible to use a more complex encoding scheme for better data density?

[@chrismcovell]

@@pokepress Yes, it's certainly possible, but for other consoles other people (and I) have just found a pin that can be used on the joystick port for example, and send serial data through it at high speeds. Said serial data can be picked up through an attached USB UART adaptor with no need to translate from KCS anymore.

[@petercorr784]

You know a good creator when they can make a video about something completely random, I have no real interest in, yet I still say captivated for 15 mins. Love your vids!

[@Sharopolis]

Thank you!

[@ecernosoft3096]

@@Sharopolis You have some of the best tech videos. I'm extremely shocked you only have ~40K subs, these are videos I'd expect from someone with 200-500K subscribers!!!... and yet you don't. It's a tragedy.

[@anunnakinibiru]

@@Sharopolis rom?

[@marinellovragovic1207]

​​@@anunnakinibiruhow about watching the video to get an answer.

[@DMMDestroyer]

There are a lot of people who are learning about this for the first time. Have never seen this before and it's one heck of a find! Appreciate the in-depth coverage and research for it like you always do.

[@lunsj]

Dumping an NES game to audio tape. Now that’s quality content. 😊

[@zehn39]

This is really cool seeing how possibly the first super Mario bros hack was made.

[@LonelySpaceDetective]

Funny, I was actually looking at Chris Covell's site the other day before I noticed this video in my sub feed, and was quite bewildered by the idea of dumping ROMs to tape; I had seen the principle of using audio cassettes to store digital data before of course, but I was wondering why you'd do that for dumping cartridge games. Guess it didn't occur to me that this lets you dump games with nothing but an Everdrive and audio-out. Also, that Tonkachi Editor is absolutely wild to me. A hex editor released for a game console that could edit games (not just their save data) and even make an effort at disassembling them? Insane!

[@TubbyJ420]

Seeing the cartridge swap work was kinda mind blowing. Reminds me of the Stop N Swap feature we almost got in Banjo Kazooie, but i think that was supposed to be a quick power down, swap, power on.

[@MarbleThumbs]

Blown away immediately by the creativity of the rom hack, I hope whoever made it got to show off more of their talent.

[@idkany293]

this was made in 1987 so they're probably dead

[@MarbleThumbs]

@idkany293 Maybe, short life span haha.

[@Str0b0]

There were radio broadcasts in the early to late 80s (at least in my country) that played C64 program codes as audio through the radio, so you could record the audio into a tape and play the games or programs on your C64.

[@nrud2121]

Nice what country and what year?

[@SweetStevieAaron]

They did that in the U.K. with Speccy games too I believe.

[@karper]

They did this in the Netherlands too..

[@Str0b0]

@@nrud2121 In Finland (we had the most C64s per capita and the C64 was called "the Computer of the Republic"). There were at least couple of dedicated radio program slots for that here, called "Mikrot Ulalla" and "Silikoni", both started in 1985 ("Silikoni" continued until 1988). Before the dedicated program slots, there was the first singular broadcast called "Surina" (meaning buzz) in 1982 (in a radio program called "Kansanmikrokerho").

[@DeathMetalDerf]

Way to go with creating the tape files, and getting them to load in via DOS Box and actually having everything work. Very nicely done, indeed. I love it when I think something I'm about to try to do feels like it very much could be an arduous task, but I end up getting it pretty quick!

[@Jolis_Parsec]

I wasn’t allowed to use the Memory Editor function in my brother’s GameShark Pro for the N64 after I managed to break his copy of Ocarina of Time by changing a value to something else and thereby causing the game to crash randomly while playing it normally.

[@BeefJerkey]

Must say, I was _very_ surprised to see a hex editor running on that. Good video, interesting subject that I wasn't expecting.

[@Tomsonic41]

As someone who grew up with the ZX Spectrum the idea of storing data on audio tapes is very familiar to me. I also did a similar 'recovery' process for all the simple games and other software I programmed as a kid and saved on floppy disk - having the Spectrum output them as audio, but on the other end was a PC recording the sound that could then be decoded for emulator use.

[@Daniel15au]

I'm surprised you don't have more subscribers and this video doesn't have more likes. Great video! The KZbin recommendation algorithm brought me here.

[@trzy]

I'm amazed that anyone could have produced a coherent hack with such a crude tool. I can definitely see someone modifying a routine here or there given the disassembler but even with said disassembler, in practice it would take an impractical amount of trial and error to produce such an extensive result. How would this have actually been done? Manually transcribe *all* of the assembly code you could find to parse off-line and make sense of before returning to modify it? I suppose with fewer distractions -- no (widespread) cell phones, no Internet, and certainly no KZbin channels like Sharopolis -- savant-levels of focus and discipline were easier to come by in the 1980's.

[@ugarit5]

Incredible tape dumping method,i wouldve never imagine you could do that...

[@julianbarron5293]

I didn’t know there was Nintendo tape dumping tool!

[@erasmobellumat3973]

Omg, too much genius move on this cartridge dump to tape! I don’t consider me a developer anymore.

[@dannythegaminggeek]

Oh! I've seen that question mark label on some ebay listings and wondered what it was. Neat, thanks so much for this video :))

[@randallwinder1244]

When the first three words of this video sound like the notes to the Super Mario Bros. Overworld theme…

[@PluckyInc]

before it was mentioned, my idea would've been is to possibly note the differences between an authentic rip of super mario bros. (or possibly a FDS version. could've been formatted to account for the disc-reading mode), or if it was in imperfect copy, maybe reverge-engineer the placement of enemies/scenery from the hack and put it into clean copy and recompile. then search the ROM hash? assuming that even if people made the same exact hack, surely the hash shouldn't be different? unless file hashing also takes the time/data it was made/saved? or a ROM hash is different from a file hash. surely there's probably a ROM hash database on the internet, which could make it easy to see what's considered a clean or "perfect" rip, compared to later-generation released by scene groups. (kinda like people who slaps their own intros into GBA ROMs).

[@catlover10192]

Yes, they're literally called "no-intro" rom sets for that very reason, lol

[@bruce_just_]

CLRMamePro does this for arcade rom sets, not only hashing but also rom set rebuilds

[@glhaynes]

I was interested from reading the title and then it just got more interesting from there!

[@CaptainXJ]

Crazy using the tape tog et the data. Now you should send it over to Kosmic to play on his Rom Hack Wednesday.

[@Hairyfoot_Studio]

Ive not seen this before, weird. Thanks for re-igniting my speccy vibes 😅

[@AwesomeHairo]

Misuse of commas.

[@RWL2012]

​@@AwesomeHairo???

[@OfficialScottR]

I'd seen this hack before from the speedrunner Kosmic playing it, but this was still an interesting video nonetheless!

[@cabbusses]

Tonkachi Mario is a strange game to try to actually play. I hope there are other interesting Tonkachi havks going around.

[@legendsflashback]

Can it be done without a composite rca (white red audio) modded Famicom ? Was the audio in PC recorded in wav

[@TobyDeshane]

I'd be VERY surprised if they used their own tool, specifically, to make that mod. That said, I wonder if the Famicom keyboard works with it?

[@catlover10192]

I mean, what else would they have used? Maybe a pc-based hex editor, I guess, but nothing more sophisticated or specialized than that would have been around

[@bruce_just_]

it’s mentioned in the video that the Super Mario hack was the example provided in the Tonkachi Editor’s instruction manual. A scan copy (still missing?) would illustrate if the keyboard is compatible. Google search already shows blog posts reporting that the controller was the primary method of modifying the game disk data.

[@pokepress]

64k should take about 29 minutes at 300 bps. Does it add some level of error correction?

[@joe82er]

I did not understand what was the problem at 7:05? What did you do to solve it?

[@Sharopolis]

When recorded the sound from the tape to my computer I also captured the noise made by the tape machine when I pressed play, which seemed to throw it off. It worked when I cut that out.

[@robertgaines-tulsa]

Nintendo seems to have a reverse story to that of the Coleco Adam computer. Coleco tried to turn their console into a computer that failed, but Nintendo turned their computer into a console. The story of the Coleco Adam is weird. Coleco had a superior game console in the United States. This console already had an expansion port that they could have made the Colecovision the center of the Adam computer. Instead, they repackaged the Colecovision as a dodgy computer setup withe the power supply placed in the printer and the tape drives having issues where if a tape was in the tape drive when the Adam powered on, the EMP would erase the tape. This was also at a time when floppy drives were becoming popular in the United States. The Adam ended up being a rushed dumpster fire of a computer that bankrupted the company. Coleco might of not gone under if it just released add-ons to its game console rather than trying to reinvent the Colecovision into an office computer. At the very least, they probably would be developing games for modern consoles like Atari went onto doing.

[@mariotaz]

This is great!

[@paulrobinson4870]

Ok this is fascinating

[@gamesthatiplay9083]

I recognize it. I think it's one of the first SMB roms from 1985 - 1987.

[@pokepress]

Interesting that 2400 bps expects a sample rate of 44 kHz, and 5200 uses 96 kHz. Guess the NES doesn’t have the power to decode QAM-encoded data.

[@FavoritoHJS]

with how easy ripping fds disks would be due to sharing the format with a then-standard floppy disk, i was surprised noone seemed to have done custom levels. well i guess we found the noone's

[@thecunninlynguist]

this is awesome

[@nugboy420]

Nice. I saw this one other time. Didn’t know what it was tho cool video

[@legendsflashback]

Wow !

[@thegreathadoken6808]

Oh yeah. Diggit!

[@jakesyoutubezone9808]

This was a good video!

[@anon_y_mousse]

Might be cool to decompile it and see what they did to it, or run it through a debugging emulator, maybe even just a simple binary diff utility. I don't know if you have any experience in that realm but could you do a checksum so I can make sure that I'll have found the exact version you've got? A simple `md5sum` would work.

[@Sharopolis]

This is the checksum: 5bdf4d83b6283ac2db36ecb32b1ea9f2 I did do a binary diff when I fist dumped it, they changed a lot of stuff whilst keeping it close enough to the original for it to be obvious which version they based it on. Most of the game engine seems to be totally unchanged and stuff like the RAM map seems to be the same. The changed the level layouts obviously, but also I think how the levels are stored somehow, to make it easier to alter the game. I'm pretty sure the version that you'll find on the usual rom sites is the same as the one I dumped. I'd bed whoever made this disk just downloaded it and copied it on there with the FDSstick.

[@anon_y_mousse]

@@Sharopolis Thanks.

[@anon_y_mousse]

@@Sharopolis I don't think I've got the right rom or the right patch, could you do an md5sum for both of those?

[@tarstarkusz]

It always surprises me just how slow these tape routines are. I have an Atari 2600 supercharger based cartridge called a Cuddle Cart and it can load a 16k ROM in a pretty short time. Your 64k ROM took 40 minutes. A 16k cuddle cart image loads in maybe 15 seconds. I have a couple of 32k ROMs that load in maybe 30 seconds, but really not even that long. The cuddle cart uses an identical tape routine as the supercharger, so it's not like it's benefiting from newer hardware. There is no reason your cart should have been so slow. When you think about it, the phone system could handle 33.6kbs and has far less bandwidth than a compact cassette. Tapes should have been a lot faster than they were. 33.6 is roughly 4kB per second.

[@CptJistuce]

KCS wasn't concerned with achieving theoretical maximums that systems of the time couldn't keep up with. 300 baud was a pretty standard interface speed at the time, so it was a widely-compatible data rate that left a lot of room for tolerance of different recording and playback settings, tape quality, and tape mechanism quality. But mostly, 300 baud was a standard data rate that everyone in 1975 handled.

[@tarstarkusz]

@@CptJistuce Well, take Commodore for example. You couldn't just hook up any old tape recorder to the machines. So Commodore knew and controlled the specs for their "Dataset." So that took unknowns around tape equipment out of the equation. Yet it was unbelievably slow.

[@CptJistuce]

@@tarstarkusz Commodore's Datasette was also unchanged from the PET through to the C128. And is an EXTREMELY simple encoding that was likely chosen for ease of implementation rather than speed or density.

[@tarstarkusz]

@@CptJistuce Yeah, when Jack was faced with expense vs performance, he ALWAYS chose expense. He was unbelievably cheap.

[@CptJistuce]

@@tarstarkusz In fairness, this was a reasonable tradeoff in 1978. There probably should've been a Datasette 2 format for the C64, but it was likely expected that people would buy floppy drives as their prices were falling dramatically. We'll not concern ourselves with the C64's floppy performance woes for the moment. And while I'm not a huge Commodore fan, my understanding of computing history rs that the industry at the time really needed someone with a concern for reducing cost.

[@johneygd]

While this is a pretty interesting discovery regardless of being the first hacked SMB game back in 1987,BUT i wonder that if nintendo released an official bootleg version of SMB in 1987 on disk,then why was there no write protection on it??? You don’t want anybody to incidentally write over it right? Sure the backside of the disk was ment for writing save data on it but games with no save feature shouldn’t allow you to write on the backside of it at all,in such case nintendo could,ve designed two types of disks to account for this,shouldn’t they? BTW it’s a shame that only those kiosk disks do have a metal protection plate on them, Also while converting a cartride and disk game from and back into a digital file by first turn it into an audile file on cassette,sounds pretty cool,but why would you do that if it takes longer to do so and hope for the best, The only reason i would ever wanna do that is to dust off my old mp3 players and store all games on it that way to make the most out of my mp3 players,just to make them more useful then ever before😁

[@IdentityCrisis1581]

Oh that is funny. They made 2 sided 3.5" floppies in japan while america only gets single sided. Im sure they did that so you had to buy twice as many disks to get the same amount of storage. I garentee they are the same on the inside. So its a thing where they decided to put the magnetic film in a one side only case so you couldn't use the other side and have to buy more disks.

[@johnrickard8512]

From 720k onward western floppies were double sided as well. The drives didn't even require that you flip the disk because they had heads on both sides.

[@Dwedit]

Famicom Disk System is not a 3.5" disk at all. It's based on the 3" Mitsumi Quickdisk, and acts more like a casette tape than a floppy disk (no seeking at all, disk gets completely rewound back the beginning every time you load *any* file). Capacity is also tiny, about 64KB, much smaller than 1.44MB of floppies.

[@IdentityCrisis1581]

@@johnrickard8512 I had never seen that type. Of course not many people I knew growing up had a computer at all. I know the 5" were double sided. But I had never seen a double sided 3.5". You would think that they all would be that way. But none of the software I ever bought used them and I never saw blank double sided disks for sale either. Which got me thinking about CDs. I know I have seen commercially produced double sided CDs and DVDs where there's a movie or part of a game on the other side. But I have never seen double sided blanks. You would think that would be a no brainier. I guess we transitioned to flash storage before it really became necessary.

[@CptJistuce]

The Sony 3.5" floppy spec is double-sided. In adhering to this spec, ALL 3.5" drives are double-sided. That's why the metal shutter covers a hole on both sides of the disk. The compact disk spec is single-sided. A double-sided CD would not be universally-compatible due to the increased thickness. Double-sided DVD is part of the spec, and was from day 1. It fell out of popularity rapidly, as the only place to label the disk is the central hub.

[@johnrickard8512]

@@IdentityCrisis1581 They aren't double sided in the same sense as a double sided CD in that both sides appear as part of the same disk.

[@crazyivan030983]

Very cool :) thank you :)

[@TheSweetiger]

How to incrase time , using a non-useful element in the video! Just recording direct on pc would not require a tape recorder and get lower risk of corruption

[@tiwanx]

i wonder if anyone has copied a cassette data audio to a cd for shyts n giggles...lol

[@とふこ]

Probably a lot of japanese programmer started with this and the famicom basic. Ok nec pc88-pc98 was probably more likely than a modded console.

[@lutello3012]

Ah, KCS.exe. I wish I were a programming/tape genius so I could make something easier, faster and/or more reliable, maybe even fit Doom II on a cassette. Why? 🙄🤓

[@CptJistuce]

Didn't LGR do that?

[@lutello3012]

@@CptJistuce In the video I watched, LGR considers saving Doom 1 E1 (2mb) on reel to reel using KCS but decided to go with a 50k game instead. KCS would take 5 hours to save the shareware version of Doom at it's highest speed and it's a pain to save much smaller files due to poor/no error correction. This can be much improved though. Not sure how easy the 7.2mb of Doom II would be but I've read of people saving 20mb to a 90min cassette.

[@CptJistuce]

@@lutello3012 My mistake.

[@Alianger]

This one could've been 3-5 mins long

[@ivan4087]

Why you didnt play sound of that tape?

[@charliefoxglove4471]

5:17

[@ivan4087]

@@charliefoxglove4471music to my ears