Thank you for watching, please take a complimentary wafer thin mint. Did you use the Wafadrive or a similar tech oddity on your system? Did you stump up for a floppy drive or like me, suffer the loading times of cassette tapes? I'd love to hear your stories. Neil - RMC
I used to copy the Spectrum's save and load routines into RAM so I could mess around with them--reduce the delay loops to make turbo load and save, and change the border colours, mainly. I also used to know exactly when the font loaded in any game because there was a distinctive sound to it, no matter how redesigned the font was. Yes, I was a strange child, thanks for noticing! :-)
The absolute first computer I had when I was 8 was some home micro that had a tape drive but I dunno what it was because it was so long ago. All I remember is that it could change the color of the text with a Key combo. I never learnt how to run the tape nor did my father. It was something a neighbour gave us.
I was actually the Technical Director for Rotronics and conceived the specification of the Wafadrive back in 1984. You will find my name on the manuals included with the WD. The main problem with the device was that powering down the speccy with the wafers in situ could cause a random flow of current through the heads, which could corrupt the data stored - the main cause of the dreaded Bad Sector messages. A fix for this was developed, but by then several thousand had already been made. Unfortunately, in the scramble to get the product onto market, there were no prototypes to evaluate for this kind of issue. The word processor bundled with the product was called Spectral Writer. Rotronics was unfortunately forced out of business when the £ crashed against the $ and they could not he sold at the originally intended price without incurring a loss. Graham Booth
I excitedly saved up for one of these, when I was still in high school. Hooked it up to my 48K Speccy, and it blew the Speccy's motherboard. Tried it on the school's 16K model, and it worked - but when I formatted the included wafa, the drive chewed up the tape. I didn't bother buying a replacement!
That's real sad my man! I bet you was just literally without a computer for ages then? Because back in our day (Well my day anyways...) if you broke anything it was gone, Unlike my 11 year old twin boys who so far have gotten through £250+ worth of Xbox one Joypads due to the hard bedroom floor. I remember I pissed about and broke my Amstrad CPC464 motherboard when I was a lad. That meant I went without a computer for a long time! My parents didn't care!
I got one at a huge discount at one of the last sinclair user fairs in London, but if you plugged it in with the computer on, it blew the motherboard - I managed to do that twice. had to send my spectrum off for repair - it was good, if you wanted faster load times on software that you could break into and save to a wafer, which mostly meant storing BASIC titles. But I did use it quite a bit.
Very good video! I just love all the history surrounding the UK home micro scene in the 80s, it's so fascinating how different it was compared to our market in the US back then. Knowing what I know now about the ZX Spectrum, I can definitely see that for all it's shortcomings and cut design corners, there really is an undeniable charm about it.
Wow. This takes me back. I had a wafer drive for my computer O level. I was in the first year group to take an O level in Computers. I had the privilege of showing off my Sinclair Spectrum and it's Wafadrive to Maggie Thatcher when she came around to open our science block at school. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
I had a Wafadrive on my Speccy, and Tasword as well. :) FYI Wafadrive was supported by the Romantic Robot Multiface1, which allowed it to copy any cassette software including games to Wafas, for fast and quite reliable loading. The Multiface1 was a very useful device for basically copying pretty much any software and games. I bought my Wafadrive in 1985 for a reduced price at one of the London home computer shows, at the Royal Horticultural Halls.
RMT comes through, as always. Who knew this oddity ever existed? The more I watch these videos the more ignorant I realize I am to so many interesting and unique items from days gone by.
Love these videos. Also loved the Retro Island episode with old school underground cracking groups. Being an Atari ST user in a foreign country, those were the only disks we saw. Wish you'd do more of those for The Replicants, Pompey Pirates, Automation, Was (Not Was), and others I completely forgot about (it's been 30 years).
You know... I had one of these when they came out and bought numerous carts to go with it. Off to the Library I went to rent / borrow Speccy tapes and copied them onto the Wafas. Now, the drive has long gone however...I do still have some of the carts I think...in a box..in the loft..somewhere. Now here lies a story... I'm afraid to say I was totally addicted to a game called 'Caribbean Trader' which was a 'bedroom programmed' game, simple but fun. I have been looking for it for years and even on WoS, it's missing in action. Now, I am pretty sure it was one of the games I copied onto the Wafas. /If/ I ever get up into the loft and find the carts, I'll quite happily post them off to you Mr RMC and hopefully, you may be able to recover the game. You can keep the carts if I find them - fair swap?
Thanks. I'll get into the loft some time and have a dig around in the boxes... If I find them, I'm happy for you to keep the Wafas - I don't have a drive!
I used to have a wafadrive unit, bought with the Rotronics printer. Together with a word processing program Tasword , I did very basic word processing with it. Don't recall any major problem with the set-up, but then I sold it after a couple of years when I upgrading to a Sinclair QL.
Reminds me of an 8 track with it's continuous loop and a metal piece indicating the joint that the system can detect. Nice video, never knew there was anything like this for the ZX!
I can recall two other similar systems. One was the Phloopy, marketed for the BBC Model B, which didn't catch on. The other was the Exatron Stringy Floppy which was quite popular with TRS-80 users.
Another obscure system was the QuickDisk, which used 2.8 inch media, and recorded the data in a spiral, just like a vinyl record! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk#Quick
A friend of mine had this Wafadrive system, and I remember being impressed by the loading times compared to cassettes. Never had one myself though; I got one of those TR-DOS systems that used 5.25 inch floppies. Kids these days think loading times on their console games are bad - they never lived through the 8-bit era!
This reminded me of the weird external 3.5 inch floppy drive I had for my psion s3a. It was dog slow and took about 30s to load up some low res grey scale boobies but it made me feel like some sort of "wizkid" at school. Like you'd see on the BBC when some spotty kid had done something mildly impressive.. TL;DR; When are you doing a Psion video!
I had one of these beauties. I remember buying it at an Alexandra Palace Microfair, along with a Multiface. Together they were a dream. You could basically load any game by tape and hit the multiface to save the game state to a wafa. I would then spend hours with the multiface poking system to crack new games and send off my pokes to Crash Magazine in Ashby De La Zouch. I would often send them in under assumed identities as I thought what I was doing was highly illegal at the time. Oh younger me, you were such a worrier.
I'm sure i remember a interview with Clive Sinclair and he mentioned a solid state wafer drive that was being worked on. Sounded like a modern sd card. Shame that never happened it could have blown all the storage mediums of the time out of the water. I have always wondered about that. :)
Thank you very much for the piano lounge music and Wafadrive retrospective... I was suitably relaxed (Friday here... @ work... ha ha) and informed about a storage device I couldn't afford in its heyday. Cheers! 😁
I was more than a little shocked when you decided to just tear into the wafer, *before* even checking if you could wipe/reformat the tape and test if you could at least store fresh data on it. Then I was further disappointed when instead of carefully putting it back together to try the above test, you just ripped its guts out! I love your stuff... but this kind of behaviour comes dangerously close to barbarism, my good sir. ;)
I think the Wafadrive had some merits for early software production on the platform, but in the long run it was the serial port supplied by the Interface , and later included as a standard feature in the Amsrad 128 that was the real victor
when i was a kid i used to lust after these fast load devices, even then i was in the radio ham club and a total electronics nerd, so i and a couple of old boys in the club built our own what we did was use high quality micro cassettes and a multiface(for the snapshot), you would flick a switch on it for record mode press snapshot on multiface then dump the rom to the tape, once recorded the switch was flicked to play mode and you loaded in as normal only faster, it it recoded at one speed but played at another, which was a function of micro cassettes, normally the slower speed mode was used to get more space on the cassette but we hacked it to play and record at differing speeds, and it worked it reduced load times quite a bit but was really finicky the azimuth was a pain to set up, i was always surprised no one was playing with speed loading at the time of course now we have internet, it seems others did have similar ideas with varying results.
Opus released the discovery 5 1/4 floppy disk drive for the zx spectrum and if memory serves fuller did an after market system. Love your videos keep up the good work from an avid spectrum owner and retro collector.
The wafadrive was much more reliable than the microdrive. I had both. The wafadrive had the parallel interface which is why i bought it you could copy tapes to it, but i cant remember how.
With very old audio tapes I notice the tape loses particles on 1st play and fowls the heads, so I play the tape once fully, clean the tape machine heads, and on next play the sound is clear again.
I am about to eat that one last wafer thin mint lol! I have just snagged one of these Rotronics devices, boxed with a bunch of wafa's. I have always wanted one, way way back when I had a rubber-keyed 48k spectrum (my first computer).
Someone tried to sell me one of these so I took on loan but didn't buy it. Seemed to work okay, but I tried to do something and it was clear that it wasn't going to get the support of the official microdrives, so I stuck it out and got the microdrives. I remember my mum saying "if it isn't what you want, don't buy it", the way that only mothers would.
I bought a Sinclair Microdrive when they first came out. The dealer sold me a partially boxed one with no instructions and (I discovered later) without the essential utilities tape, although there was a slot in the packaging for one. I very soon found out it was no use for what I wanted, loading games in more quickly. Being a newb I didn't realise you could not just copy games onto the microdrive wafers. I soon sold it on, at a considerable loss. Not that long after I bought a CPC 464, then disk drive and printer, and had a lot more fun because games were available on disk and with a plug in box, could be transferred from ram onto a disk. Elite used to load on about 45 seconds compared to around five and a half minutes on Spectrum, and even longer on the C64 (someone told me twelve and a half minutes). There was also the added advantage, not often used in the early days, of disks having more levels than the tape versions, such as Roland in Space.
There was a couple of snapshot devices made, like the Multifaces from Romantic Robot Ltd, that could very easily make copies of Speccy cassette games to microdrives and wafadrives, for much faster loading.
I bought a Wafadrive and used it for ages until one day it just stopped responding and I ended up buying a Microdrive. I still have the Wafadrive in my loft with a few tapes.
Now I'm wondering why the idea of just using 8 tracks as a storage medium never caught on. I imagine it'd make accessing multiple files easier, and the equipment would probably be cheaper since the medium had been around for so long already. Not unlike how some companies repurposed plants for manufacturing black-and-white TVs to make monochrome monitors.
Neat! I have only heard of these from books and occasionally magazines from the time period here in the US, though, I guess from the video they're pretty rare over where you're at too.
I still have my Wafadrive in a well-preserved box. After reading a positive review in a German mag called Happy Computer I spent my hard-earned tutor wages on one. I soon found out that the review had omitted an important fact: The Wafadrive system eats away some 4 kB of memory which does little for compatibility. Luckily the Multiface supported it so loading games from Wafadrive was possible after giving the game the Multiface's magic button treatment. The wafas themselves were not reliable IIRC. The first time you used them put some strain on the medium and I resorted to saving games twice on a wafa just to be sure. Maybe that is a feature of ma Wafadrive, I don't know. I moved on to the beastly Opus Discovery soon, sacrificung even more tutor's wages in the process. 😅
Sorry Sir, but I cannot help but politely point out that Asterix is, in fact, a small French cartoon character with a penchant for wild boar. and not a small star like symbol which is part of Q*Bert's name. This is, in fact, an asterisk. You're not the first, and I'm sure you won't be the last. Nevertheless, enjoyable video as always.
Phil Underhill : Granite, you're not post to do this but can I aks you a question? Do you think video games are addicting? They're supposably very addicting. In other words, I feel your pain.
Legit tape disposal protocol. I never knew this even existed for the Spectrum until now but obviously it would've cost a bomb back in the day. The thing was that cassettes were largely reliable, unless they were massively abused, and if you used good cassettes and multiples copies (from the source) loading issues were rarely a problem, other than being bloody slow. I used to do the old loading trick of counting the load time, applicable to any 8-bit cassette loading system, on my Casio F-91W watch, and then setting a count down timer to know when to return to the computer after setting a cassette to load. Nice bit of odd-bod tech that cassette system.
My friend had one in the 80's. It was atrocious. The system vars it used were put in a part of memory that was used for most 16K game's menu and player select routines, so they crashed instantly. The WafaDrive was also very noisy as I recall.
After the wafadrive was a failure and the company rotronix went under, the old stock was sold off cheaply. I picked up one of these for less than 20 quid in the hope of a bargain...only to be disappointed and quickly realised why it failed. To say it was quite unreliable would be an understatement. Happy teenage memories though, thanks!
Good video I have a Quick drive in my C64 collection. didn’t realise is was the same drive mech and media as the wafadrive tho. There was a company in the 90's called Bull electronics and they where selling the Quick drives off at five for £1 as project boxes for electronics enthusiasts, that’s where mine came from. I may have a spare wafa if its compatible you should be able to reformat it to work on your wafadrive.
Wow, This stuff NEVER reached us in Australia thank goodness. This looks like it took a lot of cues from the 8-Track tapes, but since it only required 1 track they could make the tape "skinnier" than an 8 track, hence they probably were prone to stretching which screws up the wow & flutter characteristics in a regular tape, so you can only imagine what it did to your data. They would've been better off copying the magnetic wire recording devices of the 60's era, it wouldn't have stretched as badly. I love the comment at 6:20 - Hehehe, I have seen a few in my time. :)
Oh I dreamed of owning one of these or a disk drive that used to be advertised. Can't remember the name of that: Began with 'O' I think. *Edit* Opus Discovery
I had one of these which I bought cheap after the company went bust and they were trying to get rid of them. It was a nice idea, but I found mine was very unreliable. I got a few 128K wafers with it, but most of them had the bad sector problem shown here, even then (mid 80's). I spent quite a lot of time getting games moved onto the wafers, but of course, with it stealing some of the RAM that meant you could only transfer games that used less than you had available, and most games used all 48K and custom loaders which needed to be converted, a time consuming and messy business!
Can't you just replace the tape in the wafer, using the old leader to allow the start of tape detection to work? Is it even the same width as "normal tape"? If you _could_ swap it out, are you able to then format it to make it usable?
It's 1.8mm wide and described in the gumph as video tape as opposed to audio tape quality, without elaborating on the exact specifications which would have been nice to know
Grab a ruler and knife and crack open a video.... :) Does it have a format option though? I'd imagine not and that all tapes come pre-formatted. I'd imagine finding another tape would be harder than finding hen's teeth in rocking horse poo.
Interesting. I knew and had the Microdrives, but never heard about this device (that looks pretty much as a microdrive, I mean, a cassette disguised as a disk).
I seem to recall Sinclair user published a type in patcher that rearranged some of the rooms in JSW. I wonder if the 1k program is that and the guy who typed it in just named it JSW2 as a kind of joke?
Nice machine :D I hope that you tried to record something else on it before you destroyed it. Could it be that the old data were just too faded? Glory to the cave!
I had one, I think I bought mine as they were being sold off. I could never find 128kb tapes only 64kb so essentially when I moved on to a 128k spectrum it became redundant for gaming.
I believe the Wafadrive would work with the original Sinclair 128k Spectrum, but I know it was incompatible and didn't work with the later Amstrad Spectrums. I also bought mine when they were been sold off with a heavy discount, and could only find 64k wafas for it.
@@RMCRetro I have a Wafadrive and some wafas. I just bought a dodgy looking 48k to test it before selling it on. (My own 48k is long since lost.) Would you like me to send you a wafa or two?
I have 30+ wafers here along with the drive unit. I would like to somehow preserve/archive the contents of any surviving wafer carts but have no idea how to do it! I have also posted on the wos spectrum forums about it. did you ever try backing up or moving data around with this bit of hardware?
I wonder if this thing worked with the Multiface One.... Microdrives worked with it. By "working" I mean saving games to the wafadrive with the Multiface 🤔
I think I'll stick with the Sinclair microdrive. Smaller and 100+ kb storage. Cheaper too... But I'd wait for floppy drives to come down in price if I was you. Far faster and more reliable.
Did you change byte sized to tech nibbles to avoid cluttering up other people's search results? It's such an obvious pun, but I still prefer byte sized. Millions of computer programmes back when they were on TV used it too :) I do understand though.
Yes I chose it originally as it's a natural choice used by many tech programs over the years, but then saw loads of people also use it on YT so went with nibbles. A nibble is smaller than a byte after all 😁
Certainly not new, but search Ebay for "stringy floppy", they are listed occasionally, and are basically the same thing as the Rotronics Wafadrive cartridges. The Exatron stringy floppy was somewhat popular with the TRS-80.
oh...I clicked like. number 665. I wonder if Bruce Dickinson watches this channel. as he sang a little ditty, about the Number of the beast. he might click like for number 666
I still have one of this double drivers and several tapes! But it worked rather well until I found a kind of real bad problem because of an absolutely bad and unforegivable design flaw! A tape drive allways have at least one spinning driving pins and that special pin with a sharp end rotating like an screwdriver in the bottom of the tape casette leaving a pointed deeper and deeper mark in the bottom of the cartridge shell. Treatening to make a hole to the iniards of the casette so I stopped using the driver. A real sloppy d design. But I loved my TWO Spectrums. I guess they still work and I stored them together with my TWO ZX 81, Amiga 500,Amiga 500 plus and a couple of Amiga 1200. My ac elerated Amiga 1200 in a big tower is still a good working friend together with one of three Commodore and Philips Colour displays and an OLD PC monitor in my bedroom together with my PC! Once I even conected my beöoved Tower Amiga 1200 to my PC with the help of a cable and Siameese Twins so I could use the PC grafics, mouse, display and keyboard on my PC by opening window on the PC for my conected Amiga! I love those times and my son and daughter used them to and they made my don becoming an engineer in computer and computing - just like me. But now Im retired but still intersted in computers and gaming consoles😁
I don't remember one but as a big fan it's possible it slipped in there! I've been reading HG Wells recently as was delighted at the use of the word "whanged" in Food of the Gods. They whanged saucepans at giant wasps. This is entirely irrelevant to your comment I know but somehow seems the right place to share it 😆
LOL it's hideous. Pretty much as bad as the Microdrive. Also the more you used the "tape" the longer it got (stretched) and as such capacity increased. Also the drives could not hold even hold a full 48k program, so they were only really useful on the 16k Spectrum.
Thank you for watching, please take a complimentary wafer thin mint. Did you use the Wafadrive or a similar tech oddity on your system? Did you stump up for a floppy drive or like me, suffer the loading times of cassette tapes? I'd love to hear your stories. Neil - RMC
(ps sorry for the occasional audio pop on this video... this was a rather annoying problem I'll have fixed before the next video)
I used to copy the Spectrum's save and load routines into RAM so I could mess around with them--reduce the delay loops to make turbo load and save, and change the border colours, mainly. I also used to know exactly when the font loaded in any game because there was a distinctive sound to it, no matter how redesigned the font was. Yes, I was a strange child, thanks for noticing! :-)
The absolute first computer I had when I was 8 was some home micro that had a tape drive but I dunno what it was because it was so long ago. All I remember is that it could change the color of the text with a Key combo. I never learnt how to run the tape nor did my father. It was something a neighbour gave us.
Love the Monty Python reference! It's my favourite sketch by them!
I've never heard of the Waferdrive before
Now that's some delightfully obscure hardware. Nice stuff.
Thanks Clint, please help yourself to a wafer thin mint
Greetings !!!
RetroManCave
After seeing that thumbnail, I can't help but read it as "Waffer Drive" now either.
"Aww, but Monsieur, it's only WAFFER thin..."
I feel like I am watching two NPCs communicate
I was actually the Technical Director for Rotronics and conceived the specification of the Wafadrive back in 1984. You will find my name on the manuals included with the WD.
The main problem with the device was that powering down the speccy with the wafers in situ could cause a random flow of current through the heads, which could corrupt the data stored - the main cause of the dreaded Bad Sector messages. A fix for this was developed, but by then several thousand had already been made. Unfortunately, in the scramble to get the product onto market, there were no prototypes to evaluate for this kind of issue. The word processor bundled with the product was called Spectral Writer. Rotronics was unfortunately forced out of business when the £ crashed against the $ and they could not he sold at the originally intended price without incurring a loss.
Graham Booth
It's fantastic to see you hear Graham, thank you for sharing those insights
Thanks for the heads up! I will proceed with caution with my unit! I have yet to even plug it in and see if it works.
I excitedly saved up for one of these, when I was still in high school. Hooked it up to my 48K Speccy, and it blew the Speccy's motherboard. Tried it on the school's 16K model, and it worked - but when I formatted the included wafa, the drive chewed up the tape. I didn't bother buying a replacement!
This is a sorry tale indeed :(
That's real sad my man! I bet you was just literally without a computer for ages then? Because back in our day (Well my day anyways...) if you broke anything it was gone, Unlike my 11 year old twin boys who so far have gotten through £250+ worth of Xbox one Joypads due to the hard bedroom floor. I remember I pissed about and broke my Amstrad CPC464 motherboard when I was a lad. That meant I went without a computer for a long time! My parents didn't care!
I got one at a huge discount at one of the last sinclair user fairs in London, but if you plugged it in with the computer on, it blew the motherboard - I managed to do that twice. had to send my spectrum off for repair - it was good, if you wanted faster load times on software that you could break into and save to a wafer, which mostly meant storing BASIC titles. But I did use it quite a bit.
Very good video! I just love all the history surrounding the UK home micro scene in the 80s, it's so fascinating how different it was compared to our market in the US back then. Knowing what I know now about the ZX Spectrum, I can definitely see that for all it's shortcomings and cut design corners, there really is an undeniable charm about it.
I really like learning about storage formats that I had no idea existed
You are in the right direction for becoming huge.
Keep improving but never change your style and format.
I'm staring at your avatar and feel compelled to never change my style or format. 😁 thank you for the words of encouragement
Wow. This takes me back. I had a wafer drive for my computer O level. I was in the first year group to take an O level in Computers. I had the privilege of showing off my Sinclair Spectrum and it's Wafadrive to Maggie Thatcher when she came around to open our science block at school. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
I had a Wafadrive on my Speccy, and Tasword as well. :) FYI Wafadrive was supported by the Romantic Robot Multiface1, which allowed it to copy any cassette software including games to Wafas, for fast and quite reliable loading. The Multiface1 was a very useful device for basically copying pretty much any software and games.
I bought my Wafadrive in 1985 for a reduced price at one of the London home computer shows, at the Royal Horticultural Halls.
RMT comes through, as always. Who knew this oddity ever existed? The more I watch these videos the more ignorant I realize I am to so many interesting and unique items from days gone by.
Love these videos. Also loved the Retro Island episode with old school underground cracking groups. Being an Atari ST user in a foreign country, those were the only disks we saw. Wish you'd do more of those for The Replicants, Pompey Pirates, Automation, Was (Not Was), and others I completely forgot about (it's been 30 years).
Thanks! The next episode is with Anarchy, the old demo group, really looking forward to hearing their inside stories
It's been a long time since I've seen magnetic tape decorating the bushes going down a street. Used to be a pretty common thing.
People would just throw out the window cassettes they didn't like anymore or got cheap or broke
You know... I had one of these when they came out and bought numerous carts to go with it. Off to the Library I went to rent / borrow Speccy tapes and copied them onto the Wafas.
Now, the drive has long gone however...I do still have some of the carts I think...in a box..in the loft..somewhere. Now here lies a story...
I'm afraid to say I was totally addicted to a game called 'Caribbean Trader' which was a 'bedroom programmed' game, simple but fun. I have been looking for it for years and even on WoS, it's missing in action. Now, I am pretty sure it was one of the games I copied onto the Wafas. /If/ I ever get up into the loft and find the carts, I'll quite happily post them off to you Mr RMC and hopefully, you may be able to recover the game. You can keep the carts if I find them - fair swap?
I'd be happy to transfer the game and return all wafers, email me on the channel name at gmail or DM me on twitter to discuss
Thanks. I'll get into the loft some time and have a dig around in the boxes... If I find them, I'm happy for you to keep the Wafas - I don't have a drive!
I used to have a wafadrive unit, bought with the Rotronics printer. Together with a word processing program Tasword , I did very basic word processing with it. Don't recall any major problem with the set-up, but then I sold it after a couple of years when I upgrading to a Sinclair QL.
I had a microdrive, and loved it.. was a cute little thing :)
As an old Speccy owner I have never ever seen or heard of this device. Great video and thank you as it was great to learn its existence.
Reminds me of an 8 track with it's continuous loop and a metal piece indicating the joint that the system can detect. Nice video, never knew there was anything like this for the ZX!
I can recall two other similar systems. One was the Phloopy, marketed for the BBC Model B, which didn't catch on. The other was the Exatron Stringy Floppy which was quite popular with TRS-80 users.
Another obscure system was the QuickDisk, which used 2.8 inch media, and recorded the data in a spiral, just like a vinyl record! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk#Quick
Always wanted one of these, friend from school had a microdrive and I was blown away by how fast it loaded games.
A friend of mine had this Wafadrive system, and I remember being impressed by the loading times compared to cassettes. Never had one myself though; I got one of those TR-DOS systems that used 5.25 inch floppies. Kids these days think loading times on their console games are bad - they never lived through the 8-bit era!
This reminded me of the weird external 3.5 inch floppy drive I had for my psion s3a. It was dog slow and took about 30s to load up some low res grey scale boobies but it made me feel like some sort of "wizkid" at school. Like you'd see on the BBC when some spotty kid had done something mildly impressive.. TL;DR; When are you doing a Psion video!
I had one of these beauties. I remember buying it at an Alexandra Palace Microfair, along with a Multiface. Together they were a dream. You could basically load any game by tape and hit the multiface to save the game state to a wafa. I would then spend hours with the multiface poking system to crack new games and send off my pokes to Crash Magazine in Ashby De La Zouch. I would often send them in under assumed identities as I thought what I was doing was highly illegal at the time. Oh younger me, you were such a worrier.
I'm sure i remember a interview with Clive Sinclair and he mentioned a solid state wafer drive that was being worked on. Sounded like a modern sd card. Shame that never happened it could have blown all the storage mediums of the time out of the water. I have always wondered about that. :)
Thank you very much for the piano lounge music and Wafadrive retrospective... I was suitably relaxed (Friday here... @ work... ha ha) and informed about a storage device I couldn't afford in its heyday. Cheers! 😁
My Dad had similar, called a Microdrive. I had to make do with casettes as a wee nipper
I was more than a little shocked when you decided to just tear into the wafer, *before* even checking if you could wipe/reformat the tape and test if you could at least store fresh data on it.
Then I was further disappointed when instead of carefully putting it back together to try the above test, you just ripped its guts out!
I love your stuff... but this kind of behaviour comes dangerously close to barbarism, my good sir. ;)
4:08 21Kb of storage... That's about the size of a blank Microsoft Word document these days!
i think this is my favourite UA-cam channel right now, thanks for the great video.
Thanks Zed
I think the Wafadrive had some merits for early software production on the platform, but in the long run it was the serial port supplied by the Interface , and later included as a standard feature in the Amsrad 128 that was the real victor
I'd never heard of that till today, and I've been gaming since 1982 lol
I so wanted one of these when they came out, but being a teenager I didn't have the cash. Wonderful little device
when i was a kid i used to lust after these fast load devices, even then i was in the radio ham club and a total electronics nerd, so i and a couple of old boys in the club built our own what we did was use high quality micro cassettes and a multiface(for the snapshot), you would flick a switch on it for record mode press snapshot on multiface then dump the rom to the tape, once recorded the switch was flicked to play mode and you loaded in as normal only faster, it it recoded at one speed but played at another, which was a function of micro cassettes, normally the slower speed mode was used to get more space on the cassette but we hacked it to play and record at differing speeds, and it worked it reduced load times quite a bit but was really finicky the azimuth was a pain to set up, i was always surprised no one was playing with speed loading at the time of course now we have internet, it seems others did have similar ideas with varying results.
Opus released the discovery 5 1/4 floppy disk drive for the zx spectrum and if memory serves fuller did an after market system.
Love your videos keep up the good work from an avid spectrum owner and retro collector.
The wafadrive was much more reliable than the microdrive. I had both. The wafadrive had the parallel interface which is why i bought it you could copy tapes to it, but i cant remember how.
With very old audio tapes I notice the tape loses particles on 1st play and fowls the heads, so I play the tape once fully, clean the tape machine heads, and on next play the sound is clear again.
I am about to eat that one last wafer thin mint lol! I have just snagged one of these Rotronics devices, boxed with a bunch of wafa's. I have always wanted one, way way back when I had a rubber-keyed 48k spectrum (my first computer).
Someone tried to sell me one of these so I took on loan but didn't buy it. Seemed to work okay, but I tried to do something and it was clear that it wasn't going to get the support of the official microdrives, so I stuck it out and got the microdrives. I remember my mum saying "if it isn't what you want, don't buy it", the way that only mothers would.
I bought a Sinclair Microdrive when they first came out. The dealer sold me a partially boxed one with no instructions and (I discovered later) without the essential utilities tape, although there was a slot in the packaging for one. I very soon found out it was no use for what I wanted, loading games in more quickly. Being a newb I didn't realise you could not just copy games onto the microdrive wafers. I soon sold it on, at a considerable loss.
Not that long after I bought a CPC 464, then disk drive and printer, and had a lot more fun because games were available on disk and with a plug in box, could be transferred from ram onto a disk. Elite used to load on about 45 seconds compared to around five and a half minutes on Spectrum, and even longer on the C64 (someone told me twelve and a half minutes). There was also the added advantage, not often used in the early days, of disks having more levels than the tape versions, such as Roland in Space.
You can copy from tape to Microdrive, but it isn't particularly straightforward and you need to know what you're doing.
There was a couple of snapshot devices made, like the Multifaces from Romantic Robot Ltd, that could very easily make copies of Speccy cassette games to microdrives and wafadrives, for much faster loading.
I've still got one of these.
I bought a Wafadrive and used it for ages until one day it just stopped responding and I ended up buying a Microdrive. I still have the Wafadrive in my loft with a few tapes.
I would kill for a punch card thingy for my Amstrad.
0:41 Tornado Low Level from Vortex Software!
TLL great game
In other words... a 8 track alike mechanism for loading programs and/or data.. clever!
Very interesting video, but the background music drove me crazy.
Now I'm wondering why the idea of just using 8 tracks as a storage medium never caught on. I imagine it'd make accessing multiple files easier, and the equipment would probably be cheaper since the medium had been around for so long already. Not unlike how some companies repurposed plants for manufacturing black-and-white TVs to make monochrome monitors.
Neat! I have only heard of these from books and occasionally magazines from the time period here in the US, though, I guess from the video they're pretty rare over where you're at too.
it's adorable. like a tiny 8-track.
How on earth does this channel have only 43k subs?!
I still have my Wafadrive in a well-preserved box.
After reading a positive review in a German mag called Happy Computer I spent my hard-earned tutor wages on one.
I soon found out that the review had omitted an important fact:
The Wafadrive system eats away some 4 kB of memory which does little for compatibility.
Luckily the Multiface supported it so loading games from Wafadrive was possible after giving the game the Multiface's magic button treatment.
The wafas themselves were not reliable IIRC. The first time you used them put some strain on the medium and I resorted to saving games twice on a wafa just to be sure.
Maybe that is a feature of ma Wafadrive, I don't know.
I moved on to the beastly Opus Discovery soon, sacrificung even more tutor's wages in the process. 😅
Always wanted one of these!
You say, "dead wafa" and I picture an apocalyptic scenario involving zombie storage media.
Sorry Sir, but I cannot help but politely point out that Asterix is, in fact, a small French cartoon character with a penchant for wild boar. and not a small star like symbol which is part of Q*Bert's name. This is, in fact, an asterisk. You're not the first, and I'm sure you won't be the last. Nevertheless, enjoyable video as always.
You have a lot of Gaul
nice comeback :)
I wanted to aks him the same thing!
GalacticusX Asterix fits neatly in my hate list along with 'Supposably', 'Aks' and 'Addicting'
Phil Underhill : Granite, you're not post to do this but can I aks you a question? Do you think video games are addicting? They're supposably very addicting.
In other words, I feel your pain.
Legit tape disposal protocol.
I never knew this even existed for the Spectrum until now but obviously it would've cost a bomb back in the day.
The thing was that cassettes were largely reliable, unless they were massively abused, and if you used good cassettes and multiples copies (from the source) loading issues were rarely a problem, other than being bloody slow.
I used to do the old loading trick of counting the load time, applicable to any 8-bit cassette loading system, on my Casio F-91W watch, and then setting a count down timer to know when to return to the computer after setting a cassette to load.
Nice bit of odd-bod tech that cassette system.
My friend had one in the 80's. It was atrocious. The system vars it used were put in a part of memory that was used for most 16K game's menu and player select routines, so they crashed instantly. The WafaDrive was also very noisy as I recall.
Wow that's like an 8-track tape, but smaller.
After the wafadrive was a failure and the company rotronix went under, the old stock was sold off cheaply. I picked up one of these for less than 20 quid in the hope of a bargain...only to be disappointed and quickly realised why it failed. To say it was quite unreliable would be an understatement. Happy teenage memories though, thanks!
Good video I have a Quick drive in my C64 collection. didn’t realise is was the same drive mech and media as the wafadrive tho. There was a company in the 90's called Bull electronics and they where selling the Quick drives off at five for £1 as project boxes for electronics enthusiasts, that’s where mine came from. I may have a spare wafa if its compatible you should be able to reformat it to work on your wafadrive.
Wow, This stuff NEVER reached us in Australia thank goodness. This looks like it took a lot of cues from the 8-Track tapes, but since it only required 1 track they could make the tape "skinnier" than an 8 track, hence they probably were prone to stretching which screws up the wow & flutter characteristics in a regular tape, so you can only imagine what it did to your data.
They would've been better off copying the magnetic wire recording devices of the 60's era, it wouldn't have stretched as badly.
I love the comment at 6:20 - Hehehe, I have seen a few in my time. :)
Oh I dreamed of owning one of these or a disk drive that used to be advertised. Can't remember the name of that: Began with 'O' I think. *Edit* Opus Discovery
Great stuff. Interesting hardware.
I'm curious about that 5 1/4 disk there. You show us the back side twice makes me wonder what embarrassing phrase is written on the front.
That's a homebrew remake of Akalabeth for the C64. And definately not Sam Fox strip poker.
Amazingly informative as ever !! Loved the tape disposal comment ;o) Great stuff :o)
I had one of these which I bought cheap after the company went bust and they were trying to get rid of them. It was a nice idea, but I found mine was very unreliable. I got a few 128K wafers with it, but most of them had the bad sector problem shown here, even then (mid 80's). I spent quite a lot of time getting games moved onto the wafers, but of course, with it stealing some of the RAM that meant you could only transfer games that used less than you had available, and most games used all 48K and custom loaders which needed to be converted, a time consuming and messy business!
Always wanted one of these, but, the lack of software meant we never got one
I is like an 8-Track cartridge also used on the SINCLAIR QL.
It is. The QL had the Sinclair Microdrive shown on the leaflet so a very similar Stringy Tape technology
Don't underestimate the punch tape machines😉
Nice video! I love weird and forgotten media.
Can't you just replace the tape in the wafer, using the old leader to allow the start of tape detection to work? Is it even the same width as "normal tape"? If you _could_ swap it out, are you able to then format it to make it usable?
It's 1.8mm wide and described in the gumph as video tape as opposed to audio tape quality, without elaborating on the exact specifications which would have been nice to know
Grab a ruler and knife and crack open a video.... :) Does it have a format option though? I'd imagine not and that all tapes come pre-formatted. I'd imagine finding another tape would be harder than finding hen's teeth in rocking horse poo.
Interesting. I knew and had the Microdrives, but never heard about this device (that looks pretty much as a microdrive, I mean, a cassette disguised as a disk).
Nothing beats the Opus Discovery 1
JSWII could mean Jet Set Willy 2, the second release of a popular ZX Spectrum game.
JORGETECH Jorge it could, but 1k seems a little small. Not that we should entirely trust it with its bad sectors
I seem to recall Sinclair user published a type in patcher that rearranged some of the rooms in JSW. I wonder if the 1k program is that and the guy who typed it in just named it JSW2 as a kind of joke?
Nice video, i feel i should be in Starbucks drinking a Latte with that music ;-)
Nice machine :D I hope that you tried to record something else on it before you destroyed it. Could it be that the old data were just too faded? Glory to the cave!
I did indeed, the wafa was beyond resurrection. Another commenter has asked me to transfer data off their old wafas so that could be a fun follow up
I had one, I think I bought mine as they were being sold off. I could never find 128kb tapes only 64kb so essentially when I moved on to a 128k spectrum it became redundant for gaming.
I believe the Wafadrive would work with the original Sinclair 128k Spectrum, but I know it was incompatible and didn't work with the later Amstrad Spectrums. I also bought mine when they were been sold off with a heavy discount, and could only find 64k wafas for it.
this video made me really hungry for wafers
Shame you dont have anymore wafa disk, would like to see it working.
Another commenter has asked if I may transfer date for them off of their old wafas....so of that happens I'll be sure to film the process
@@RMCRetro I have a Wafadrive and some wafas. I just bought a dodgy looking 48k to test it before selling it on. (My own 48k is long since lost.) Would you like me to send you a wafa or two?
I'd like to see Beta Disk/ TR-DOS.
It's wafa thin. You cheeky bugger!
I have 30+ wafers here along with the drive unit. I would like to somehow preserve/archive the contents of any surviving wafer carts but have no idea how to do it! I have also posted on the wos spectrum forums about it. did you ever try backing up or moving data around with this bit of hardware?
Loading from Wafadrive and then saving stuff to other media seems to be your only option.
I used my unit mainly with a Mulitface for backups of tapes.
I wonder if this thing worked with the Multiface One.... Microdrives worked with it. By "working" I mean saving games to the wafadrive with the Multiface 🤔
Yes, it was supported by the Multiface One, perhaps later versions, too.
@@seraphinberktold7087 Thank you for your reply 🙂
I think I'll stick with the Sinclair microdrive. Smaller and 100+ kb storage. Cheaper too... But I'd wait for floppy drives to come down in price if I was you. Far faster and more reliable.
Did you change byte sized to tech nibbles to avoid cluttering up other people's search results? It's such an obvious pun, but I still prefer byte sized. Millions of computer programmes back when they were on TV used it too :) I do understand though.
Yes I chose it originally as it's a natural choice used by many tech programs over the years, but then saw loads of people also use it on YT so went with nibbles. A nibble is smaller than a byte after all 😁
Great vid. Any chance of a micro drive video?
Yes, or perhaps a Sinclair QL some day with its built in Microdrives
RetroManCave yes a much forgotten computer the QL
Does anyone know if you can buy any wafers new, or if anyone is producing them anymore?
Certainly not new, but search Ebay for "stringy floppy", they are listed occasionally, and are basically the same thing as the Rotronics Wafadrive cartridges. The Exatron stringy floppy was somewhat popular with the TRS-80.
oh...I clicked like. number 665. I wonder if Bruce Dickinson watches this channel. as he sang a little ditty, about the Number of the beast. he might click like for number 666
Why didn't you reformat the wafa and then try to save and reload some data, before pronouncing it dead and opening it up?
Alwas wndered wha he intended market for these devices are, and how many manufacturers were making tapes for it?
I still have one of this double drivers and several tapes! But it worked rather well until I found a kind of real bad problem because of an absolutely bad and unforegivable design flaw! A tape drive allways have at least one spinning driving pins and that special pin with a sharp end rotating like an screwdriver in the bottom of the tape casette leaving a pointed deeper and deeper mark in the bottom of the cartridge shell. Treatening to make a hole to the iniards of the casette so I stopped using the driver. A real sloppy d design. But I loved my TWO Spectrums. I guess they still work and I stored them together with my TWO ZX 81, Amiga 500,Amiga 500 plus and a couple of Amiga 1200. My ac elerated Amiga 1200 in a big tower is still a good working friend together with one of three Commodore and Philips Colour displays and an OLD PC monitor in my bedroom together with my PC! Once I even conected my beöoved Tower Amiga 1200 to my PC with the help of a cable and Siameese Twins so I could use the PC grafics, mouse, display and keyboard on my PC by opening window on the PC for my conected Amiga!
I love those times and my son and daughter used them to and they made my don becoming an engineer in computer and computing - just like me. But now Im retired but still intersted in computers and gaming consoles😁
Did I detect a reference to a bond movie?
As. ter. isk. Asterix is a gaullic cartoon character.
It is only wafferrr theeen.
Damn... you beat me to it ;) Skills
I doff the cap to anyone who remember's Rabbit Software's 'Escape MCP'.
Wow, you're the first who's ever noticed - I've been using it for 25 years!
Asterix? Aster-Risk! We're Brits not colonials. :-) Good video as always, though.
OK how is a tape cassette MORE tangible than a punch card?
You can't grip the holes :D
@@RMCRetro You can grip the ???? on the tape? Impressive.
Did I hear a H2G2 reference?
I don't remember one but as a big fan it's possible it slipped in there! I've been reading HG Wells recently as was delighted at the use of the word "whanged" in Food of the Gods. They whanged saucepans at giant wasps. This is entirely irrelevant to your comment I know but somehow seems the right place to share it 😆
0:41 - Ford, just look at that beauty…
LOL it's hideous.
Pretty much as bad as the Microdrive.
Also the more you used the "tape" the longer it got (stretched) and as such capacity increased.
Also the drives could not hold even hold a full 48k program, so they were only really useful on the 16k Spectrum.
helloooo
Well helloooooo
lol
Don't litter
All in jest my friend
Can we see inside of the drive?
OMG that comment about the disposal of tape out of a car is brilliant!
Great video! Enjoyed the piano music in the background as well!
Glad you liked it sir 😊 have a great weekend
RetroManCave Thanks, and you, too!