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This brings back so many memories. Most of them not good... As a university student in 199mumble I had a side gig as the (freelance) technical writer for Amstr

This brings back so many memories. Most of them not good... As a university student in 199mumble I had a side gig as the (freelance) technical writer for Amstrad Action - the magazine that pioneered covertapes, as explained in the article. The actual writing was easy and I could do it in my sleep: mostly answering readers' questions about printers, or reviewing the few applications still being released for the Amstrad CPC. But I also put together the covertapes. And that was _hard_. The main drawback is that I was very lucky if I got a master tape of the game. Mostly I just got a standard retail copy. That meant it invariably had copy-protection on of some sort... and I'd have to decrypt that to make a new master for Future Publishing to send to their duplicators (Ablex Audio Video). Fortunately I knew a couple of the best "crackers" working on the CPC, and I wasn't entirely a slouch myself, but even then it was a bunch of unnecessary effort. As AA neared its end, the editorial team gave me a bit extra to not only produce the cover tape, but to commission the software on it as well. Occasionally I'd turn up a winner. A friend of a friend at university turned out to know the author of Chuckie Egg, the all-time classic 8-bit platform game, so I got that pretty easily. (Without copy protection!) That was a good moment. But often it'd just be some less than impressive game from the late 80s that hadn't sold particularly well first time round. And as the article alludes, there were inevitably bugs. Finding out, after 10,000 copies of a tape have been duplicated, that it won't work properly on one of the three models of CPC... that wasn't a great moment. Ah well. We printed a bugfix in the next issue. Tapes were sufficiently unreliable that I suspect half the users just thought there was a loading error anyway.

alisonatwork 4y ago
Thanks for your efforts! Amstrad Action was a major part of my youth, and kickstarted several interests of mine e.g. hearing the track by "Urban Dance Terrorists" which made it onto several of my personal mixtapes, then BooTracker getting me into writing my own music on the computer. I also attempted to write an adventure game in GAC and anything at all in assembly language thanks to the free covertape apps, and failed utterly on both accounts. I did love all the type-ins, though, and perhaps writing small programs in Locomotive BASIC is what ultimately led me to becoming a software developer. AA prompted my first email too, when I asked my mom - who worked at a university - to email The Pilgrim or The Balrog or one of those guys for a hint on a game I was stuck on. And he replied! It was like magic. The games weren't all that bad! I remember getting Stormlord and Dizzy from the tape, which was super cool because I had been reading about both for years and unable to play them because nobody I knew was able to acquire a copy. The more disappointing ones where when they came with a game I already had, like Exolon/Uridium/Zynaps/Ranarama, all of which were already on the Hewson smash hits compilation I'd played to bits, but I'm sure some other kids out there loved them. Good times.
aardvark179 4y ago
You say the writing was easy, but I seem to remember inventing questions about connecting your toaster to your CPC. :-)
aidos 4y ago
Hat tip to you, my friend! A small data point as to how your bad memories balance out the universe. Despite not having a lot of disposable income, my parents got me a subscription to AA (staring somewhere in the late 80s). Receiving each new edition was the most exciting thing in the world as a kid. I could not wait to get home and see what was on the tape this time. The magic of software that was instilled in me in those moments has stayed with me for life.
- raffraffraff 4y ago
  Same, but... Your Sinclair. (Also from Future Publishing). One of the best games I've ever played was on a cover tape: Chaos: Battle Of Wizards.
  - marbletiles 4y ago
    Same but YC, and the game was Microdot. I used to scrutinise every line of those magazines, now I can barely scroll to the bottom of a single link without switching apps twice.
  - vmilner 4y ago
    Gooey blob!
    - raffraffraff 4y ago
      If you managed to raise a golden dragon from the dead and hop onto it, you were pretty much invincible.
  - olddustytrail 4y ago
    YS was originally Dennis Publishing and was bought by Future in 1990. Learning from TFA that they nearly failed with their Amstrad offering yet ended up buying Your Sinclair is a spooky synchronicity!
    - lproven 4y ago
      I believe that, much more recently, Future Pubs has bought the entirety of Dennis Pubs now. (!)
LeoPanthera 4y ago
How do you copy-protect a tape? Isn't it just audio? Can't you just duplicate it?
- xfz 4y ago
  I seem to remember some tapes were designed to load faster or otherwise decrease the margin of error when reading the tones, such that it wouldn't easily survive the degradation of tape to tape copying. Probably at the expense of the original not being as reliable. I was a kid at the time so could be wrong about this.
- darrenf 4y ago
  Copy protection of tape games took a different form. It wasn’t that you couldn’t make a copy, but there were extra barriers to making it playable. Eg Jet Set Willy came with a card on which was printed a coloured grid, and upon loading the game prompted you to enter the colours found at random coordinates before it would start. http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/57256/Jet-Set-Willy-Code-Card/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/57256/Jet-Set-Willy-C... Copying that card was high effort, since no one had camera phones or scanners or photocopiers etc.
  - becurious 4y ago
    LensLok! http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/56946/Lenslok-Software-Protection-Device/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/56946/Lenslok-Softwar... Trying to play Elite on Christmas Day and repeatedly failing to enter the correct two letters!
    - vmilner 4y ago
      Thankfully I won a Multiface memory snapshot device in a magazine competition and could bypass all this stuff...
      - becurious 4y ago
        If I remember correctly when the 128K Spectrum came out they changed some bytes in the top end of the 16K ROM that had been used frequently by games as an Interrupt Mode 2 vector table (point I register to be the high byte of the address) so that they could page in and out between the old and new ROM. Elite was affected so Firebird (subsidiary of British Telecom) would let you get a new tape that fixed this bug but it also removed the LensLok protection code.

alisonatwork 4y ago

Thanks for your efforts! Amstrad Action was a major part of my youth, and kickstarted several interests of mine e.g. hearing the track by "Urban Dance Terrorists" which made it onto several of my personal mixtapes, then BooTracker getting me into writing my own music on the computer. I also attempted to write an adventure game in GAC and anything at all in assembly language thanks to the free covertape apps, and failed utterly on both accounts. I did love all the type-ins, though, and perhaps writing small programs in Locomotive BASIC is what ultimately led me to becoming a software developer. AA prompted my first email too, when I asked my mom - who worked at a university - to email The Pilgrim or The Balrog or one of those guys for a hint on a game I was stuck on. And he replied! It was like magic. The games weren't all that bad! I remember getting Stormlord and Dizzy from the tape, which was super cool because I had been reading about both for years and unable to play them because nobody I knew was able to acquire a copy. The more disappointing ones where when they came with a game I already had, like Exolon/Uridium/Zynaps/Ranarama, all of which were already on the Hewson smash hits compilation I'd played to bits, but I'm sure some other kids out there loved them. Good times.

aardvark179 4y ago

You say the writing was easy, but I seem to remember inventing questions about connecting your toaster to your CPC. :-)

aidos 4y ago

Hat tip to you, my friend! A small data point as to how your bad memories balance out the universe. Despite not having a lot of disposable income, my parents got me a subscription to AA (staring somewhere in the late 80s). Receiving each new edition was the most exciting thing in the world as a kid. I could not wait to get home and see what was on the tape this time. The magic of software that was instilled in me in those moments has stayed with me for life.

raffraffraff 4y ago
Same, but... Your Sinclair. (Also from Future Publishing). One of the best games I've ever played was on a cover tape: Chaos: Battle Of Wizards.
- marbletiles 4y ago
  Same but YC, and the game was Microdot. I used to scrutinise every line of those magazines, now I can barely scroll to the bottom of a single link without switching apps twice.
- vmilner 4y ago
  Gooey blob!
  - raffraffraff 4y ago
    If you managed to raise a golden dragon from the dead and hop onto it, you were pretty much invincible.
- olddustytrail 4y ago
  YS was originally Dennis Publishing and was bought by Future in 1990. Learning from TFA that they nearly failed with their Amstrad offering yet ended up buying Your Sinclair is a spooky synchronicity!
  - lproven 4y ago
    I believe that, much more recently, Future Pubs has bought the entirety of Dennis Pubs now. (!)

LeoPanthera 4y ago

How do you copy-protect a tape? Isn't it just audio? Can't you just duplicate it?

xfz 4y ago
I seem to remember some tapes were designed to load faster or otherwise decrease the margin of error when reading the tones, such that it wouldn't easily survive the degradation of tape to tape copying. Probably at the expense of the original not being as reliable. I was a kid at the time so could be wrong about this.
darrenf 4y ago
Copy protection of tape games took a different form. It wasn’t that you couldn’t make a copy, but there were extra barriers to making it playable. Eg Jet Set Willy came with a card on which was printed a coloured grid, and upon loading the game prompted you to enter the colours found at random coordinates before it would start. http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/57256/Jet-Set-Willy-Code-Card/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/57256/Jet-Set-Willy-C... Copying that card was high effort, since no one had camera phones or scanners or photocopiers etc.
- becurious 4y ago
  LensLok! http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/56946/Lenslok-Software-Protection-Device/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/56946/Lenslok-Softwar... Trying to play Elite on Christmas Day and repeatedly failing to enter the correct two letters!
  - vmilner 4y ago
    Thankfully I won a Multiface memory snapshot device in a magazine competition and could bypass all this stuff...
    - becurious 4y ago
      If I remember correctly when the 128K Spectrum came out they changed some bytes in the top end of the 16K ROM that had been used frequently by games as an Interrupt Mode 2 vector table (point I register to be the high byte of the address) so that they could page in and out between the old and new ROM. Elite was affected so Firebird (subsidiary of British Telecom) would let you get a new tape that fixed this bug but it also removed the LensLok protection code.