I'm interested in places that didn't have access to

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Im from Chile. Videogames became popular here in the late 80's-early 90's, when the country became a democracy again. But since we were so poor, resellers bought failed consoles from the US and sold them here. So when the burgers were playing SNES/Genesis we were playing Atari computer 400/800/XE.

http://www.retrogames.cl/vcturbosoft.html

Since it was impossible to get the games at that point, a company called Turbosoft was created by some fellows here and made multicart with Atari games. They also made cassette tapes to load games and invented a way to load videogames using a VHS and a cartridge. After that NES clones appeared and then the company died.

>>3766543
Janitors over these cmon /vr/

>>3766529
I remember seeing you post this in an earlier thread, I still think it's one of the coolest multicarts I've seen. Using a VHS tape as storage for games is ridiculous and whoever thought of it is mad genius.

>>3766503
I'm from Russia, played Dendy since 4 years. Console worked around seven years.

>>3766503
the coolest thing i remember about gaming in the 90's Russia is that you could swap cartridges at almost any store that sold video games just for a few rubles. so every month i would go out to the store, bring an old game i've beaten or don't like/play anymore and get a new genesis game for next to nothing. saved a lot of dough that way.

>>3766529
I've heard of compact casettes being used for storage but not fucking VHS tapes. Did it have instructions/prompts showing you how to use it or was it audio only?

I remember seeing a "use VHS tapes for harddrive backup" device ad in U.S. computer magazines in the late 80s or early 90s

>>3767375

yes, it came with a set of instructions, obviously in Spanish. For example the games come loaded into the VHS as data but you can see the titles when playing the tape. So if you wanted to play for example Pole Position, you fast foward the VHS till you found the load screen in the video. Then you turn on your Atari computer using Option with the cartridge reader on. Then you connected the VHS video output to the cartridge and press play on the VHS, wait to load, and when the game loaded stopped the tape.

For example loading montezuma revenge from an audio tape took like 8 minutes. From the VHS it took like 45 secs. The creator said if he came up with this idea 5 years earlier he probably could have sold it to Atari and sell pack of games in VHS format in the US. Sadly at the point he invented this system Atari computers were almost dead and Atari was being raped by Nintendo.

>>3768926

the VHS i just posted where just backups of a hard drive with Atari games. Sadly the technology wasnt that good, so you couldnt make a copy of the VHS and use it because the copies usually had a huge data loss. Only the copies made directly from the HDD worked fine.