Software is almost impossibly easy to download, distribute, and access compared to 40 years ago. Everything is bigger, faster, and more flexible, but there's a certain charm to the ways of diskettes and cassettes that is hard to recapture. That doesn't mean we can't try.
By the time you read this, it's likely that Kontrabant 2 will have already hit the airwaves on Radio Študent in Slovenia. At 9:30 pm Slovenia time (UTC+2 in Daylight Savings Time), if you are tuned to 89.3 FM, hitting record on a cassette tape will capture a buzzing sound that will run until just over 50KB have been transmitted. If all went well, you can load the tape into your working ZX Spectrum or bring it to the Computer History Museum in Slovenia and use theirs to try it out.
The game is in Serbian, as it was originally made for what was then Yugoslavia, for ZX Spectrums mostly smuggled in from Western Europe.
My ZX81 also loaded programs from audio tape cassettes and I remember that some computer shows back then on TV also had a short audio broadcast to allow users to record the audio, and load it into the computers afterwards.
But if you don't have the computer, missed the broadcast, and can speak Serbian, you can play Kontrabant 2 on the Internet Archive's emulator.
See
40 years later, Kontrabant 2 for ZX Spectrum is rebroadcast on FM in Slovenia
Celebrating radio waves, magnetic tape heads, and smuggled 8-bit computers.
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technology #
retro #
Serbia #
zxspectrum #
gaming
