Distribution Converting Games to Audio?

[GamingWalrus]

I made a game a little while back, and I thought it would be cool if I converted the .exe file to audio, so I could record it on a cassette or .mp3 as a way of distribution, like the old Commodore tape drive games. Does anyone know a way I could do this?

 

[YellowAfterlife]

There should be some more or less standardized methods of encoding binary data as audio, though perhaps not MP3, since that is a "lossy" format, meaning that bandwidth would have to be limited to avoid data loss due to how MP3 handles encoding.

Commodore tapes could only house some ~65KB of data (again, due to limiting bandwidth to avoid corruption), meaning that you could only fit the datafile (.win\.unx\.ios\...) or source code on that.

On related subjects, PICO-8 has an option of encoding it's ~20KB "cart" files into small PNG images spotting a screenshot of the game along with title\description. This works by encoding binary game data in lower 2 bits of each channel (RGBA), meaning that every non-transparent pixel of the image holds 1 byte of information at cost of what looks like very subtle noise. Of course, this requires the image to remain in PNG format - encode it as JPEG, and data is all gone.

Overall, I think it is not even so much a matter of encoding the game as audio, but finding/creating and distributing a decoder for it, raising questions about the whole idea if you need an additional program to unpack what now takes more space than the original binary file would.

 

[Yal]

I'm pretty sure encoding random binary data as sound wouldn't result in something classifiable as 'music'

What I'm thinking is that the hard part isn't encoding the game, the hard part is decoding it from the player's perspective - they'd need an interpreter of some sort, and possibly good loudspeakers AND a good mic, depending on if you use a digital media or not.

Also, the DS Bangai-O game (which looks really fun, btw) had a function to save and load custom levels as sound files using the DS' microphone. It could be worth checking out how that worked and study the structure of their files to get an idea about how quickly you could transfer data and such - the DS mic isn't exactly voice actor quality, and the system assumed pretty bad speakers as well, so it's tailored for robustness against data loss because of noise and distortion.

 

[Yal]

Um @Yal, you realise he isn't trying to make music here don't you?

You realize the rest of the post was about the actual problem, don't you?