Tape Recovery Simulator 96K

Please wishlist / follow the game here! The more people are gathered around TRS96K, the more features the final game will have.

Imagine this:

You're an employee of the greatest company on Earth*, Extra-Extra Systems. EES has recently hired you as a Tape Recovery Specialist. Your most used software is a tape player.

*greatest company according to its manager, Darlibatis.

The second most used software an emulator. Kind of. As his creator puts it "I've named it microEmulator trying not to offent the great developers who built fully working emulators."

During the golden age of computers, data was stored on normal audio tapes, and it sounded like this:



Don't worry, you'll learn to love it.

By default, data doesn't want to be loaded. You'll need a lot of tweaking to pull it out from the decaying state it likes to linger in.

Some extra buttons might help. Or hinder. The sound needs to be tweaked to perfection. And beyond.

Before even considering starting your work, you need something else. Yes, you guessed it. Management. Can you even breathe without a boss stressing you in a gentle yet horrible way ?
Meet Darlibatis. He is your boss. He's highly demotivational to say the least. Below you will see a glimpse of his excruciating management style.

Trailer

TRS96K in the press

• In Tape Recovery Simulator 96K, you’ll work for a firm specializing in recovering data from cassette tapes. - INTO INDIE GAMES
• TRS96K Is a Wonderous Niche Indie Title About Data Recovery on Tapes. - 3Bit
• TRS96K is definitely based on an unique concept. - Indie Game Picks
• Tape Recovery Simulator 96K Announced - Blue's News
• Tape Recovery Simulator 96K Puts You in the Hi-Top Sneakers of a Data Recovery Specialist - AusGamers
• Tape Recovery Simulator 96K - Games Freezer

Features

• Lots of in-your-face buttons. We swore to stay away from user interfaces featuring too few buttons, or controls hidden in unintuitive places. If there's a need for a button, it will be there, in plain sight.
• Hardcore philosophy.
• As bugs invented modern gaming, we'll have them too. Really. One of the main characters, Goghe is a developer, and the story makes him the lead dev of the Advanced Virtual Loading System & Expert Micro Emulator. As he's constantly tired & overworked, bugs are unavoidable.
  So we can blame Goghe for any actual bugs within TRS 96K. The most interesting ones discovered during the real life testing of TRS 96K will be defanged and will become part of the game.
• Fully offline. No internet connection necessary. You can play it in your favourite means of transport ( even the moon lander) or during your preferred apocalypse.
• Auto-save functionality. We will add a very simple yet effective savegame duplication feature so you can switch off your computer (or do even worse things to it) any time you please. As a consequence, a power outage won't send you back to the beginning of the game.
  Unfortunately there won't be any manual saves. We realize that power users who like to take control over their saving process will be disappointed, but manual saving does not really fit together with this game.
• Almost no programming knowledge required. You might even end up knowing a little more programming after finishing the game.
• Minigames as 8bit assembler or BASIC applications which might require some (minimal) tinkering to work.
• Depending how you see it: no loading screens or a lot of loading screens. The game itself won't have any loading screen, but the content found on tape definetly will. After all, original 8bit software took even 15 minutes to load a 128 Kb game. This is where loading screens really shone.
• Turbo button. Since original load speed was very low even to 80's standards, TRS 96K will offer a way to load data faster for those who really insist on it.
• Easy difficulty mode with audio assists for players who would like to learn the lost art of almost automatically loading data.
• Normal difficulty mode for players who succeeded at least once in their lifetimes to load data from an audio tape.
• Hard difficulty mode for players who need no assists, little help and like to load data as it was originally intended: 48KB in 5 mins. TRS 96K allows hardcore users to put the game in the background and react on audio queues so they can focus on something else during load.
• Yes, there is a volume button, which goes all the way down to 0 for users who have yet to aquire a taste for how data sounds. It also goes all the way up to 100, just to give you a cheesy reply when your parents or the neighbouring galaxy asks you to turn the noise down: "it's not noise, it's data". You will need to supply your own powerful speakers / gravity transducers to achieve this.
• Democratic approach to the development process: at specific points, the users will be asked to vote for features / changes or take difficult decisions.
• Invented conspiracy theories
• Mock advertising.
• No cinematics to pollute the gameplay. None.
• Add a feature yourself. We're at the beginning of the implementation phase and we're still flexible. So please get in contact with us if you have a great idea you would like to become part of TRS 96K.

Main Characters

• Devot Dalibartis is the boss of Expert-Expert Systems. He's the worst kind of boss: always thinking too highly of himself and too little of his employees. He takes bad decisions. He's always blaming others for his mishaps and always adding unnecessary pressure to an already exploding situation. He is most of the time highly demotivational. Like all bad managers do to some degree, he's lost contact with reality and he's clearly delusional.
• Goghe Daiai is the main developer working for Devot. Hadn't had a good night sleep since mid-2000s. He would be an ok developer if given enough time to do a decent job. Unfortunately he's overworked, overstressed, tired all the time, shrouded in clouds of caffee and prioritizing so much he needs to first prioritize his priorities. The software needed to recoverd data has been fully implemented by him as his night project and it might have one or 2 or 231 critical bugs. But he's also helpful in all matters, probably a consequence of his allknowing complex. He's a big fan of 8bit computers and has a large collection of software and tutorials to support the player for a smoother loading process.
• Travis™ is an email client currently being implemented by EES. It uses an AI to eliminate the need for outdated keyboards as a means to reply to emails.
  The long-term goal would be to, needless to say, make a ton of money for Darlibatis.

Random Thoughts

• Warning: TRS 96K is a trip down memory lane, when computers did a lot less, but were nevertherless incredible machines. You will be at risk of buying 8bit or tape equipment with low WAF after playing the game.
• We're always surrounded by fast data exchanges we never experience. Fast WLANs, fast hard drives, countless cores on the CPUs of our mobile phones. All moving mountains of data at breakneck speeds we never feel. You might consider yourself lucky if you get a blinking led showing you it's doing something. Not anymore. You can now put everything in perspective (including your 2Gb/s new SSD) with the loading routine's whopping speed of 160 bytes/s.
  
• Yet, the most advanced computer on earth, the human brain, can read printed words at a similar rate.
• Newer generations should experience at least once in their lifetimes the struggles we went through trying to play our favourite games and the joy we experienced when it finally worked. Maybe this is why we ended up in IT: fighting the machine and then bending it to your will gives you a tremendous sense of accomplishment.