Cheat Engine

[magellenproject]

(PORTABLE CASSETTE PLAYER)

About a 9-11 months ago I bought a used SONY WALKMAN Cassette Player w/ Radio out of nostalgia(I had Portable Cassette Player when I was 13 in 1997), Curiosity, and wanting to see peoples heads turn as i walk down the street with it. I then bought another one (WM-EX304 Auto-Reverse)

My Question is this. If you take into account all the complication that goes behind the scenes in microprocessors(And I'm going to go out on a limb and assume an Ipod has a microprocessor[is that correct?])
All the complications of Assembly Language, which I knew nothing about really until i started using cheat engine. Then I realised just how flipping complicated an MP3 must be if it has, a Microprocessor that uses ASM.
Right?

But then a Portable Tape Player has lots of intricate parts and is quite an advanced piece of mechanical engineering over Tape Decks.

So which is more complicated internally? A Portable Cassette Player(walkman) or an MP3 Player/Ipod?
Bearing in mind an Ipod has to probably do a fifty? or hundred? Thousand? (ASM) instructions to get the songs of the flash memory.

Even 15 ASM instructions make my head hurt in Cheat Engine, yet all the Japanese had to do in the 80's when miniaturizing the Tape Player was moving a piece of Nylon tape over a metal head.


Which do you think is more complicated?
TAPE Players or IPOD?
It seems Ironic to me that even the stupidest of people today use Digital Media PLayers/Smartphones yet they could never understand how to build those gadgets if someone explained how to build them.
Yet a (TAPE) walkman seems so easy to build. But then things can seem simpler than they are sometimes.

[STN]

It has more to do with engineering/physics than computers/asm and i am like a dumb blonde when to comes to that so i could be seriously wrong. But a Cassette Player/walkman is easier, it is all mechanical and there are no digital parts. You just push a button and it powers on playing the cassette. The cassette is just a magnetic tape.

My father had a radio built completely on these light bulbs/tubes(i don't know what they are called - http://www.dos4ever.com/E1T/ideezet.jpg ) from my great grandfather's era (or maybe before that, idk) which i broke as a kid but i remember the principle being very simple. Those bulbs would light up when you catch a signal.

Ipod/mp3 are incredibly easy to program if you look at software side, they have OSes inside them. What was hard was the first IC to build, i don't think its hard now to build mp3 players.

If you think of it this way, the first machines were hard to build because there was no base. Once there was a base, it is easier to build upon that. So tape/cassette players were hard to build, ipod isn't really a new technology, just an expensive makeup to otherwise shitty smartphones. Smartphones aren't a new technology either if you think about it, laptop/computers are and smartphones are just an extension to that.

I doubt even the CEO of Apple knows how to build a smartphone if you tried to teach him but that doesn't matter because that is not his job.

[atom0s]

There are multiple videos and articles that cover how a cassette player works which give a really good view of how things are working internally both mechanical and electrical.

In terms of which is is more complicated, it is hard to say or give one or the other that title. One has moving parts and is both mechanical and electrical while the other is just electrical with no moving parts (unless it has an internal platter drive like the original MP3 players.)

I'd say they are pretty complicated in their own ways. There are hundreds of small pieces that make up a tape deck between the parts that handle locking the tape in place, to the parts that handle the movement of the reels. There is also the electrical parts that handle the reading of the tape and converting it to an audio signal.

If you think outside of the box and step back to look overall at both, they are quite similar in terms of how things work in a general stance.

Think of it like this:
- A tape deck rotates a cassette in order to continue reading the data from the ribbon.
- An MP3 player uses a while loop to read the files contents. (Similar to rotating and manually reading from the ribbon.)

And so on. In a way they are very similar just that the technology has advanced to more compact, easier, and more sufficient means of handling the steps to get the audio from point A to point B.

[crashoverride93]

I would say complicated and simple mean different things to different people because everybody has their own strengths and weaknesses and different knowledge sets hence the mp3 player could be more complicated then the cassette player to one while the cassette player could be more complicated then the mp3 player to another

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