Rome By Night, the interactive video on vinyl in 1984

Rome By Night, by the Italians Dhuo, dates back to 1984. And this vinyl contains a program for the ZX Spectrum on its B side.

Instead of repeating all the previous articles each time, I’ll refer you to the dedicated page, which explains what I do with vinyl records and lists all the pages containing programs, explanations, etc.

 

The cover explicitly shows that there is a program on the record, and the back indicates how to launch it.


The technical part was (very) simple. I cleaned the record, tested it with my first recording, fixed one point, and it worked. Efficient. The program launched directly in the emulator and it’s a sort of interactive video, synchronized with the music from side A of the record. I uploaded the video on YouTube, but it’s not unlikely that it will end up without music someday. The good news is that the synchronization with the music is rather good, without any lag. So, I don’t have much to say: it worked quickly, I liked the music, it’s efficient.

There’s a video recorded on a real ZX Spectrum that also shows a bit of animation when the program loads (I usually skip this part with the emulator’s fast loading).