A Modder Is Making Doom and Super Mario Bros. Playable on VHS Tapes
What If Video Games Came on VHS? One Modder Is Finding Out
Hardware enthusiast Throaty Mumbo has built GCVHS, an experimental system that runs games from ordinary VHS cassettes. The tape carries encoded executable data alongside multiple video streams; an FPGA board and an RP2350 microcontroller decode it and handle input. The Doom demo is an on-rails FMV experience with eight simultaneous streams, while Super Mario Bros. uses tape imagery as a backdrop for hardware-generated gameplay. It's a deliberate, impractical tribute to the Action Max era.
But with enough ingenuity, patience and a willingness to pursue a thoroughly impractical idea, even an old videotape can become something surprising again.
- addled
What I’ve wanted to see is for someone to stuff the recording hardware from a VCR and a raspberry pi into a VHS cassette to constantly write new video to a tiny loop of tape.
Kind of like those 3.5mm to audio cassette adapters for old car stereos.
- giancarlostoro
I had the Gargoyles Movie in on VHS a version my mom bought came with a whole table top type game or something, and the movie allowed you to play a tabletop game with a VCR game it came with, I dont rememver if I even had a VCR so I don't remember if I played it or not. I just know she got it at a garage sale, and I watched Gargoyles religiously.
- wolrah
The element of limited choice between multiple tracks makes me think of the Viewmaster Interactive Vision which implemented a much more limited version of the concept.