Using a modern web to recreate 1980s horribly slow & loud loading screens
summary
Recreates ZX Spectrum tape loading by generating pilot/sync/data tones with Web Audio, computing pulses from 855 T‑states at 3.5 megahertz and mapping them to ~22 samples per binary one at the audio sample rate, feeds that through a scriptProcessor (chosen over audioWorklet for browser support and intentional main‑thread blocking) to detect pulse widths and render bars on a canvas API, converts images into 6,912‑byte screen/attribute format and fixes attribute clash using typed arrays, and it runs in the browser and even successfully loads on a real 1982 Spectrum via an audio jack.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Start
- 1:35Flashing imagery
- 6:17RECREATE THE SOUND
- 12:39EX BYTES CANVAS X
- 16:10BARS FROM AUDIO
- 17:18RENDERING SCREENS
- 20:23ATTRIBUTE CLASH
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