Digital Cassette Tape Drives | Nostalgia Nerd
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- Опубликовано: 14 окт 2024
- Tape Drives, Cassette Decks, Tape Decks, Datasettes... they go by many different names, but for many of us, they were the gateways to 8 bit adventures of past. Being from the UK, I spent many an hour waiting for games to load via. tape on my ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. So, when news of fangled digital tape decks caught my ears, my attention was given. Based on Arduinos and known as Tapuino, Arduitape, TZXduino, Casduino, Sio2SD and all manner of other names, I've grabbed a couple in cases I liked the look of to demonstrate for you, right here, right now.
-eBay links-
Tapuinos (C64) - nnerd.es/2xjfhnh
TZXDuino (Amstrad, Spectrum, MSX, Acorn) - nnerd.es/2D5gjZ0
Sio2SD (Atari 8 bits) - nnerd.es/2CY0685
Digital Tape Deck (Commodore logo) - nnerd.es/2NIxh3H
-Reference links-
uCassette (Tim Harris) - sharewareplus.b...
DC2N - www.luigidifra...
Arduiotape blog & details - arduitape.blogs...
Peter Edwards (Tapuino) - sweetlilmre.blo...
Charcole C64 Tape - github.com/cha...
With thanks to Andrew Beer for his assistance - / sadkennith
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As to why the Spectrum still got an occasional loading error, I'm not entirely sure. The hardware can be quite fickle, especially given the age of the machine. I suspect it's just down to the signal strength from the Tzxduino. Same as with a standard tape deck.
I was a specky
C64 tape deck uses a very simple circuit, still, very good to convert analog signal to pulse stream. Also, the C64 tape deck is made for the C64. On the other hand, micros using consumer shoebox recorders are challenged due to the wide range of implementations, mechanisms, audio amplifiers, change from one recorder to another. Some recorders are not even made for music, just spech, have limited bandwidth and bad speed regulation. So part of the work was seeking a good matching recorder. IMHO the probability of falure is higher in those that accept EAR/MIC than a pulse train.
Just got a 3d printer. Retro cases anyone?
could be (electro)magnetic interference from whatever...those old machines often didnt have the best shielding...
Also, i never know anyone back in the day who had a tape drive; every c64 kid i knew had a 1541. (i am austrian.)
Maybe it is just a UK thing. (:
I've found that with some games I've had to use winamp to increase the volume levels ...maybe that's it
that several minutes for loading from tape would often turn into several hours, not because it seemed to take forever for something to load, but because of how many dam attempts it would take to before it would actually load properly!
Clem, you know better than anyone here that is all down to deck maintenance. I suffered the C64 datasette when child, but when I started servicing tape decks, adjusting the deck and getting it working, was piece of cake and success rate was 80% to say something. Tape decks were cheap and also a bit neglected by the users
This thread brings back memories of the time i spent an entire night trying to load an adventure game from a magazine cover tape; as i found out, the tape head azimuth was ever so slightly different from the header part to the actual data part for one of the files that made up the game. Thus i had to adjust the tape head a tiny bit between the two parts until i finally succeeded in loading the whole game. As it then turned out, the adventure consisted of one large room with a total of 9 (nine!) places within that room. Hardly worth the effort, it would seem, right? Well, the game had some very funny puns which redeemed - in my opinion - the effort, puns such as examining a bed to discover a spring from which you could then drink, or shake a calendar which contained dates which you could then eat. Of course, the game is now available as a tap/tzx file over at Wos.
Yeah, I was in awe (in a bad way) slow the C64 loaded disks then, Hell even the friggin' Apple ]['s drive was a ball of fire by comparison.
Our gaming years lol we had sooooooo much patience ^^ And being a hardcore gamer I would play multiple games all day every day :) So many great memories with great people gaming
But it was cheap af compared to other solution.
“Your mate Cuthbert who lives in the nearby Manor House might have a disc drive.”
LOL! That’s so accurate as well...
I have to wonder if this is a direct reference to Dylan Cuthbert, who is the British programmer of Star Fox.
Funny thing is that in captioning, it's "your mate Ronnie". I don't know, did deaf Britishers have different upper-class friends with different names?
The major downside for me to have a modern day version of the tape deck is that my gaming time is nowhere near as extensive as it was when I was an 11 yr old using my speccy or c64 at 13. Loading the titles straight into both my c64 and speccy via their non-tape sd devices is the only way I can fit my retro fix into the free time I have.
However, the sound of a speccy tape loading does transport me to a more innocent time and truth be told they remind me not so much of the games themselves but the family members who were around back then who sadly are no longer here - just playing `kunckle dusters` on the c64 reminds me that my now passed away grandfather bought me that back in the day and I still remember him giving me the tape and watching what it did.
Sorry, man. Hope you're doing well
I did indeed, loved both of them and still do (even had an orange monitor for my c64 - gawd that was crap to play games on) - thankfully I had a normal telly too.
It's just FANTASTIC that these people are keeping these moachines alive long past the decay of their original media. I never had the chance to use them, but I was born in the thick of the era; 1984. Would have loved to experience these technological wonders of the time.
Chozo, in a sense you still can enjoy that time, via emulation; Both the ZX Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC range, and the Commodore C64 have vast software libraries online. In fact, people are still writing brand new software for these machines to this very day. Not to mention, hardware is also been made which extends the capabilities of the machines as well, such as for instance interfaces that allow you to hook up a hard disk or a memory card for mass storage.
Actually you can still create brand new tape copies of these old games. And they would probably last longer & would be more reliable than the cheaply mass copied computer tapes back then. Also much cheaper and easier to make than a self made EPROM cartridge. That's for sure :P
KRAFTWERK2K6
You're talking as if the media is failing, i have approximately 200 cassette games for the Spectrum & c64 and they all run perfectly!
ChozoSR388, it still is possible. LRG is enjoying it today. Its tricky. First you need to just identify the period you wish to have a computer in. If you live out towards California, there is a place which wearhouses old stocks of computer technology. If not, you should know that you can find them in other places. It takes time. It seems to me you want to experience possibly an MS-DOS experience of that time. So you will need MS-DOS 3.0, floppy drives. CD Rom that works with MS DOS. Anyway, you don't actually need to have an actual MS-DOS floppy drive for when it comes down too it. There are NEW USB floppy drives. Just get one of those. You can find the drivers you need online including MS-DOS copies, and utilities once you get your computer and there parts. Here are a list of the common ones you will need. MS - DOS 3.0 (COMMAND.COM) - to check it you just VIEW its properties or RUN it and type ABOUT I think if I remember. You will need (EDIT.COM) MS-DOS Editor , SCANDISK.COM Hard Drive maintenance program), FORMAT.COM (Its for formatting a Hard Drive). Anyway, there are a number really. Try a web search of MS-DOS Essential Tools. Game disks and stuff can be very helpful. Most games were played in DOS. But, a Copy of Windows 3.1 would often be very nice. For the rest of it, you just have to identify things you might like to do, and set out to get stuff to complete this goal. PS - Nobody click on anything with a DOT COM as they are not meant as a WEB LINK. LOL. They are list of DOS executable and as such...LOL are not places to go on the web. Internet sights may exist and may or may not be good internet sites to visit. I was born in 1984, but experienced DOS in the 1990's. Someone gave a freind of mine a Tandy and we messed around with it for countless hours. It had a DOS made by Tandy and not Microsoft. XD. Just know this so you might locate other companies DOS's and well...active commands can be different for each. IBM had there own dos as well. Commands entered into a DOS had dramatically different effect than those of other types.
ChatBoxGuy Unfortunately, I live on the East coast, well, not exactly, but close enough for government work...
I recently bought a Bush tape deck from Argos for 25 quid for my spectrum it's quite good as it has usb on and you can use winamp to make the tape images loud enough so the old age pensioner (my spectrum) can hear the data....it serves it's purpose but to have the digital display and the ability to cycle through games would be really nice. Great upload by the way ....always informative😄
@Andrew Rose in computer years....they a bit like dog years ..... The spectrum is an old age pensioner
That sound of the end of a Spectrum loading screen put a big grin on my face :)
It looks really good too.
I still have the Spectrum-compatible clone (see my video).
@ Keir Hardie: Same here, and i don't even HAVE a Speccy.
I have a clone, and I am planning into using it from time to time :)
It was glorious..but some games would crash at that point unfortunately
The wonderful loading sounds on a ZX Spectrum. Truly a excellent reason to get these Digital Cassette Tape Drives.
Nowadays there are lots of faster, more convenient options to load games, but this one beats them all when it comes to authenticity and nostalgia. Great video. Thanks for sharing these devices.
The Ocean loaders with music always get us mega pumped back in the day. Especially 4 and 5, but they were all really great when paired with the artwork. 3 probably sticks in my mind most because of Wizball, but yeah.
Nothing beats a real datarecorder.
Retro nostalgia is all about the look, feel, sound and smell of a vintage device warming up.
Some of my first (and best) gaming experiences were playing the Dizzy games on the C64
How could anybody not like the loading the loading sounds?
TheStwat aka Stuart Wright It’s a cool sound, and a nice novelty, but it’d get really annoying if you played the Spectrum all the time.
The sound of the magic loading into the Spectrum ❤️. It’s funny that over 30 years later I can still recognise a boot loader sound or graphics image sound.
Would be nice to slow the loading down on the C64 device to give more time to play on a Thalamus mix e loader.
I was a C64 user in Germany for some years. I think disc was the dominant format here. Tape was common, but it was seen as a budget/ entry level option, but most systems were upgraded to disc eventually.
Users would not give up their tapes after buying a disc drive and tape software was often very cheap, so many systems ended up having both.
I remember the volume on my cassette deck needing to be around '7' for optimal loading. But one or two cassettes preferred '4' when errors occured. I can see the numbers now, and feel the volume control between at my fingertips. I absolutely love RUclips for stuff like this. Nostalgia through the roof, my friends.
Man, that's where I step aside for a bit. Had a cassette drive with my Vic-20 but all of my Vic games were on cartridge. I had like...2 tape games on my C64 (Forbidden Forest was one of 'em) and I _hated_ waiting the 5 or so minutes it took to load. Just...just gimme my disk drive man.
I’m with you there. I was glad to see the back of tapes when I got i disk drive for my C64.
Always great to see the new stuff to keep our old systems going. No secret either that recreating the original experience is a huge part of it.
No one from this generation belive me when I said we used to play games stored in cassette taps
Love the retro synth wave backing music. Goes perfect with your educational vid. Well done!
I had the enhanced US version of the ZX Spectrum (Timex-Sinclair 2068) Since it used any old tape recorder one had lying around, I did the nerdiest thing one could do in 1984, I loaded and saved BASIC programs on a 5" mono reel to reel tape recorder (a Radio Shack branded JVC Universal 505 from the early 70's) It worked! I did it for...Reasons! I also used that recorder on a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a, You could have the "remote" function under software control for reading/writing sequential data files, Watching a computer start and stop a reel to reel tape recorder was just nerd heaven!
I have a tape deck for my C64 but here in the States, as you have so eloquently pointed out, disks were far more common. I don't think I ever remember seeing commercial tape titles. I used mine only for creating silly programs and saving them for fun.
Thanks for sharing. I want one of those, not because I think I would use it but just to have it.
Thoroughly enjoyable video to watch. fantastically edited and it just flowed nicely :) I have very fond memories of the casette tapes and also loved hearing the sound on the ZX Spectrum. I would drive my parents bonkers with it, as they wanted me to mute the TV but I enjoyed hearing it, and I could tell if it was loading properly too by the sound of it! These are great devices to keep that tape loading experience going beyond that of mechanical tapes on aging players.
A few years too late, but I recently wrote a game for the zx spectrum. A big part of it for me was the loading screen! Waiting for the screen to build line by line, then the colours with the different screeching sound is a massive nostalgia hit for me. Sadly most people will open it from a snap image and never see that bit of it :(
I remember so fondly loading my tapes on my ZX Spectrum clone, the TK90X, and staring at the loading screens in awe, be cause those loading screens were so damn impressive! I think the first loading screen that has caused me that "WOW" factor was Spy Hunter. Its loading screen was so frickin' cool!
Really cool video. My parents wouldn't get me a spectrum or C64. My sister got a CPC ⁴64 but she never used it. But when they went out it was gaming heaven (at least for a little while). Now I'm so old that i am struggling on Xbox one. Your videos are great. Thank you.
I had a 128MB serial tape drive, which plugged into the serial port. It was big as a toaster, and the tapes were surprisingly very small. Very reliable and the envy of others, because floppy disks were the only alternative to store files. Re-writable CDs were barely new and cost over 7 dollars each. The CD burners were about 250 dollars.
Nostalgia Nerd, never ever stop making your vids. Great work every time. Some other greats such as Dan Wood have slowed down which is a real shame. I know how much time and effort is required to do a simple youtube vid, but yours are always so polished in presentation and background research. Wonderful work.
As an American C64 owner as a kid, I got the 1541 floppy with the machine. I never owned the Datasette until I got one at a flea market in 2002.
One of your recent videos showed the tapuino which got me looking for more information. Couldn't find much, so thanks for this video!
back in 1990 when I got my C64 with turbo loading cartridge they sold compilations on tape here in poland in stores.. with 20-30 games on it for like 2 bucks. that was awesome..
Great video! I live in the US, and most of my games were on disk or cart, but my C-64 collection was hand-me-down and a dozen or so of the games I had were on tape. I remember thinking it was awesome that programs could even be stored on tapes.
I always loved loading Q-dex off tape. The load screen and the music was something to look forward to.
I showed a mate of mine my Commodore 64 setup which has one of these things. It looks like a little baby C2N, but performs all the same functions. "and this is how we loaded games back in the 80's, only back then, it was a real cassette tape, not an SD card, and yes its this slow". his response "bet you and your mates had heaps of games, one of you had to have a double tape deck stereo". That was the beauty of tapes, pirating a game was as simple as getting a blank C30 cassette and dubbing it. :)
Us commodore users also got a taste of the noise the speccy made, as some of the games like Commando would play the squeaks and farts of the binary data stream while the loading music routine and score were loaded.
Great minds think alike sir - I bought one of these about a month ago! VERY nice little piece of kit. Mine has Maxduino on it, which works very well.
Listening to the speccy loads takes me back to being a kid again
Can these fast load at all? I saw tutorials on youtube years ago of people speeding up the tape in adobe audition, then loading them up in MP3 players, and as long as the silence pauses remain the same, you can load up a five minute tape in less than 30 seconds.
Never mind putting first, I can be the first one to say "you're here Larry, you're everywhere" that is technically worth more Internet points. RESULT :-)
i was wondering this too actually. As with such a clear input of data into at least the spectrum without tape head hum in the background and other mess on magnetic media, you can get away with speeding the load process up quite a bit. I've hooked up my spectrum to my pc, coverted a .tap to wav and then sped up in audacity and I could comfortablly get away with about 20% and it load it in ok.
@ Larry: think it depends on how it was converted from T64, TAP or PRG to WAV. With the tool Wavprg you can selected how fast it should load. So the wave file would be only a few seconds long. Maybe 20 seconds or so. Simply speeding up the audio probably wouldn't work. The tape loader of the program that needs to be loaded, would have to be adjusted properly to the cycles. It would be a bit of trial and error to see if it works properly. But that's how you can do it. But yea, if done right most games wouldn't run longer than maybe 30 seconds or a minute. Even the bigger titles or multiloaders.
You can but you can't on the Arduino based machines. If you use SNAP2TZX from the FUSE Utilities you can get a Z80 snapshot load in a minute with TZXDuino at 3000 or 4000 bps but there are programmes that you can use to convert Z80 snapshot to even faster but not on an Arduino based device.
The main reason for Arduitape/CASDuino/TZXDuino was for a cheap SD card interface that would have motor control on computers that support it, using a standard interface. CASDuino can change the baud rates of MSX CAS files but changing the speed of Spectrum files on TZXDuino isn't possible for many reasons.
Larry, this isn't music were talking about loading. We are talking on about the load table time of software.
I’m glad there are still load errors, it provides for an authentic experience. Also, I’m surprised no one has put one of these inside a datasette case.
Sacrilege! But no, it would be quite nice.
They have, but this video isn't very informative: ruclips.net/video/U-mSOT4lGKg/видео.html
The biggest problem I had with the zx spectrum was getting through so many audio jack cables, they never seemed to last and so me and my brother would resort to applying pressure against the cable at awkward angles to get the connection, stacks of cassette boxes and the like. So many times something would shift and the connection be lost!
Yeah man that's triggered a long lost memory. The red, yellow and I believe white wires into the cassette deck. I remember cables coming loose back in the day and my dad needing to source a new set. Jesus fuck do I need to get into the attic. Channels like this in 2018 have made me absolutely want to get a CRT (older the better) back up and rolling and bring the best of today's technology (fast loading and piracy) together with the things that made me happiest in my childhood (micro computers and 8/16/32bit consoles).
I’ve got a Tapuino branded one for my Plus 4 and C64, works superb and you can also dump tapes to tap format files.! It’s essential if you want to retain the original loading sequences.
Here in the US the Vic-20 and C64, while not as popular as in the UK were still pretty common. Back in the early and mid-80s I used both. I had the tape drive for my Vic-20 and later had the 1541 floppy drive for the C64. When I got another C64 around 1993-94 I was able to eventually get that beast online via a local Freenet (ASCII only) and a floppy loaded with Telix.
These days I still have a C64C with a Goliath 1541 (as well as a Atari 600XL, two Ti-99/4a's with a tape drive, a TRS-80 (lovingly known as a Trash-80 back in the day) and a non-functioning Timex-Sinclair 1000 with a 1020 tape drive).
Yep, feelin' old :)
Ahhhhh that magical loading sound of a spectrum :)
Proper Friday nerd, what could be better!
I had a few C64 games that took so long to load that one mentioned that a Moment is equal to two minutes, and another had a loading screen stating "Patience Is A Virtue", and that was from the 1541. I never had a tape drive, let alone saw one Stateside, but I could imagine having a second tape deck for playing music so that when Madonna finishes you know your game is ready.
Another great thing about tapes is when you're loading a Speccy game and suddenly the screeching is replaced by Madness's "House of Fun" briefly before the game continues to load. That's pretty much my only memory from having a Spectrum as a child 30 years ago and has always stuck with me.
as always a brilliant video in presentation and production. you have an amazing way of entertaining and educating all at the same time. keep up the amazing work, us in the know love it and NEED more! love your channel man, your the goods.
The tapuino, intended for the C64 also does a really good job on the PET. Very handy, given how hard PET tapes are to come by.
The in game music at 5:10 is Rydeen by YMO from Japan
I really love the sound of the tapes loading, miss that... i need to get a spectrum :D
The “Decathalon” loader sounded like an arrangement of “Rydeen” by Yellow Magic Orchestra.
Yep, that was YMO allright!
hingeslevers Great! It wasn’t just me :)
Yeah definitely YMO there... Sega used an arrangement of Rydeen too for the game Super Locomitive.
To people from this age, where you wait a few seconds for your game to load (usually), the idea of loading your game from a tape might seem stupid, but actually it has a number of advantages: It is low cost to produce YET can store a REALLY large amount of data, limited only by the length of the tape; You can easily make a back up copy ; and, believe it or not, it was actually kind of fun to press 'play' on the tape machine, go make a sandwich, have a pee, watch some TV and then listen for the intro music for your game coming from your bedroom.
There was this game for the 64 called "Shamus" - 100% unfair game where enemies would literally appear right where you're standing when you went from one screen to the other - that I nevertheless found intriguing to play (at the time) and would turn the volume all the way up on my 9 inch black and white television (I know, I know), press play and head out to the lving room to watch TV with my family until the music started.
Good times...
ok.
I like the 2-handed sword style music you have in the background, the Middle Ages with phonographs...
Yet again, an awesome video.
You should do a video on the first ever games on CD-rom, Codemasters did a 20 or so game compilation on the Spectrum I remember seeing advertised. You just hooked your fancy £1000+ cutting edge stereo up to the tape inputs on the Spectrum by it's headphone and Mic sockets, and the CD played the sounds you would otherwise find on a cassette but off the CD as audio files, with the few minutes of dial-up modem sound like any tape would have to load the game in.
I doubt most people know that the Spectrum was the first home of CD-Rom games.
The entire idea of computer programs on cassette tape is so foreign to me! I love it! Would have been nice when I was a poor ass kid.
I remember opening up my Commodore tape deck and finding the edge connector. We connected my friends tape deck and made perfect copies. Naughty but nice...
If something like this was available when I was a kid, sneakily playing on my brothers CPC-464, I would have been able to enjoy much more than 80% loading and 20% hurried gameplay before being caught :) So cool!
"A number of minutes" as a 10 year old in 1987 with a C64C it felt like a lifetime......then it failed to load!
It really did.
I had a disc drive in 1986 and so did a few others at school. The 1541 clone drives were cheaper and more widespread. The downside being the one I had didn't work with copy protected discs. Most of us copied the tape games to disc. The Action Replay carts even let you transfer multi-load games to disc. Real 1541 drives were incredibly rare in the UK for a while and that's likely why many never had a disc drive.
That sound reminds me of the best time of computing
I had a 1541 drive and a 64 Action Replay cart. All I needed back in my school days of game swapping in the playground :)
Shouts out to anybody who had an Acorn Electron and a tape drive back in the day. That's what I was repping from a very early age thanks to my dad. Loading, and indeed saving. I had 2 cassette decks I'd use - top loaders like these. A Philips one (bulky) and a slimmer one who's name escapes me. It's all in an attic waiting for me to find again some day.
Daley Thompson's Decathlon was the first game I loaded up on my brand new C-64. I was blown away by the music and picture quality coming from a 48K Spectrum. I use C64 Forever and you can see the loading screens with the correct options set :).
I always loved the look of the Spectrum+ and 128. So much more professional than those wobbly rubber keys!
Aww ... I remember those sounds. I had an AmstradCPC464 in the 90's.
My kit built Timex-Sinclair of 1983 was connected to a Craig cassette recorder (very fancy in it's day audiophile tape deck, and because it had a lot of outputs). Didn't bother with disk drives until I got a used 286 computer with a 5.25" drive, around 1992. Skipped 386 completely. Then got my hands on a 486 DX. Ever since been building computers. Sadly, the next computer I build maybe the last because mobile will catch up to PCs in computing and can simply plug it into a monitor -- not only desktop, body appliances. So it's like deja vu all over again.
Ohhh I must get one of these for my msx 64k as most my original tapes will no longer load. I'm unsure if it's the tapes or the cassette deck as some do work.
Over the years I’ve occasionally purchased cassette games for the C64 from the UK, with surprisingly good luck. Max Headroom works flawlessly (unless the drive hiccups during loading), as do a number of more obscure titles...
I once purchased The Young Ones on cassette for the C64 from England. It arrived in a Commodore box, but an Amstrad tape.
Finding an Amstrad in the States is like finding a castle in the States. There ain’t none unless some yank made it happen and it ain’t gonna be cheap.
I remember a 15 min wait for some C64 games! Nothing lost there then, no matter how good the music or loading screen.
Just reminded me of the early days with the Acorn Atom, where the standard speed was just 300 baud, but with an extra ROM toolkit (or just a couple of pokes / ? operators on the Atom), you could switch it to 1200. Using ALL the peculiar dual banks of RAM, I wrote a program that could read an incoming 300 baud tape, store it all and then write one out at 1200.... it was a popular tool, as was my tool for reading control characters in tape filenames - if I recall, that was also needed to defeat the primitive copy protection in order to do the fast tape conversion.
I later pulled a similar trick for BBC Micro tapes, reading them in and then writing a copy with the interblock gap cut to the minimum, just enough that the relay clack didn't mess things up
Few minutes to load ha! Mate I use to load a caset game then taken my bike out for a spin around the block and by the time I was back the game just had loaded lol thanks for the vid.
These are cool! I'm with you- there really is something great about hearing data.
On the ZX Spectrum remember to connect the digital tape player to EAR on the speccy and not MIC. It`s loads louder. I was confused but I do seem to remember that is how it was back in the day.
The only practical use for these devices was for backups. They even marketed them and labeled the products in the US in that manner, calling them cassette backup drives. Trying to use them as an actual media drive was a horrible experience, that took so long and loading failed so often, that everyone I knew who owned one, believed their device was defective or malfunctioning.
Thumbs up! I love using OEM stuff but sometimes it is either to expensive or hard to find. Things like this help with that.
Yes!, I'm glad people are making this stuff today!
5:05 Daley Thompson Decathlon Load Screen Music is "Rydeen" by The Yellow Magic Orchestra
Nice one man. I have brought my Amiga500 back to life with the Gotek Floppy Emulator. Maybe it's time to get some life back in to my Commodore128 with nostalgia tape emulation :)
I had the authentic tape experience on my C64 back in the day. Even though it's very nostalgic I don't really miss it.
The nice thing about this is that it'll help preserve the software longer, since tapes will degrade eventually, and eventually there won't even be new tapes
Have still a data tape deck (not the commodore one but a similar one which is compatible) and there were audio interfaces as well for C64 computers to be able to connect a standard audio cassette recorder via a DIN cable. But these digital disk drives for SD reading are actually a nice thing!
A trick most probably dont know.. The original computer decks had fixed speed, but later models of voice recorders came with all the jacks needed for computer plus they had speed control. At least in MSX, at least with the recorder i used, many games allowed up to 160% speed or more and loaded, many others just "crashed" or werent recognized. I still wonder what made some games work at higher speed and others not....But in the time.. it was like discovering the biggest thing ever....
Tape decks? Pah, I had an Amstrad CPC 464 with a built in tape reader!
Woah, I didn't know there was a tape reader for Amstrad CPC.
I had this, too! I later got the CPC 6128 with build in 3" disk drive, and had to buy a tape deck to plug into it 😄 Fond fond memories! I learnt to type on those machines, as well as program 😊
Booo...booooo! Oh, yeah it's not 1988 anymore, so I don't have to tell you that no one wants to be your friend, because your mum bought the wrong computer :D
@@_Piers_ XD so true. The C64 was MUCH BETTER.
No one would have been your friend either :p
Everyone had a Spectrum, because everyone else had a Spectum :)
All of my favorite retro game youtubers are Brits. I find that weird considering how completely different our experiences were.
Born in the early 80's USA. Growing up, I never even knew that you could put software on tapes. Computer gaming was a small fraction of an already niche market at the time.
Once the NES hit, it was almost a solid decade before computer gaming really regained any popularity over here. Heck, once the NES hit, everything else looked outdated and cheap. I remember my grandmother had an atari that we never even plugged in. Playing pong on a wooden box with weird looking joysticks simply wasn't appealing. I never knew anyone else who had an atari or really any other gaming system of the generation besides the NES.
I didn't hear of the spectrum etc, until the days of youtube, though I did get a commodore in the early/mid 90's. That was fun to mess around with for a few hours. It did come with a floppy drive and a single game. I remember learning that you had to enter commands to start the game and my interest was gone in a flash.
The way the ZX Spectrum and C64 make pictures on the loading screen makes me wonder if SSTV on ham radio was based on this in the very early days of computers connected to radios.
The Spectrum one will probably work on an IBM 5150 too, if you can find or make TZX files of any 5150 software. The 5150 cassette signal has very similar timings to the Spectrum one.
They really need higher res screens on these devices with jog wheels for quick scrolling.. otherwise nice little contraptions - the loading wait, art and sound is part of the experience!
I remember my dad got us a little black box for our Commodore 64 that allowed us to load games from a VHS, i don't remember it having any badges or labels on the box and i think it was just black with two red buttons but i've never seen one show up on any of the retro tech channels i've come across.
Living in Belgium and owning a C64 with a 1541 disk drive back in the days, most people I knew with a C64 (or C128) had disk drives as well. A lot of time was spent in copying disks. Everything still sits on a shelf at my parents house.
You claim that people with disk drives did not get to enjoy the loading screen art and tunes. You are mistaken, we did have it. I'm not sure how I did it but I printed out a lot of these loading screens with our Commodore mps803 dot matrix printer.
I had one game on casette, "Det stora nordiska kriget" or "The big nordic war" in english. It was written in basic and took a little over ten minutes to load from casette, no loading screen at all!
When I bought again a C64 a few years ago, the second thing I bought was a 90 tape collection of game and restored a couple of C64 tape decks, One was commodore and the other was a generic copy. Like in the UK,, here disk drives were insane expensive and most of the SW was on tape. So tape was the way to go. Part of the magic of was the trial and error thing, uncomplete load, no load, game hanged at the start (corrupte program) figthing with the azimuth every 7 days and so on LOL. The generic tape deck had FAR LESS azimuth issues than the 1530. The shorter game was Seafox, loadng in just 16 counts (tape counter) and the longest one was time tunnel with 55 turns. I assume that time tunnel didnt use any turbo loader, since Giana Sisters was WAY MORE COMPLEX and managed to load faster. GOOD TIMES. Emulators are good, but I will prefeer the REAL TAPE experience. I can record any image to tape using a DOS SW and a parallel port adaptor. This SW even let you choose what type of loader do you want to add.
I wasn't alive at the time, but I love the tape loading sounds too.
Operation Wolf was sublime with a mouse.
When i was played first version of The Wicher i had same feeling, it load some house at 2-3 minutes and going back to open world took all 5. Glad, that it is fixed now.
All us kids in the US had tape drives early/mid 80s. I had like 100 games between my Tandy CoCo and TI 99/4A
You mentioned American’s all using floppy drives with home computers vs Brit’s using compact cassette tape drives. That is only partially true. We (America) did use compact cassettes as storage just like you did but just for shorter period of time. In the U.S. when the first home computers came out in the 70’s, such Apple II, Commodore Pet, and Tandy TRS-80, they all used compact cassette tape drives for storage as 5 1/2 floppy drives (the standard for floppy drives at that time) where still very expensive at that time. It wasn’t until the early 80’s that prices for floppy drives came down enough that most people used a floppy drive with their home computers. As to why the floppy drive was very costly for much longer in the U.K. I see to recall hearing something about was import taxes or some other tax on the drives that was at fault, though after trying to verify this, ’m not so sure anymore if it’s really that simple. I know in the U.S. that the Commodore 1541 5 1/4 floppy drive for the C64 was introduced in ‘82 at a price of $400 which was 2/3 of the price as the C64 itself ($595), meaning a complete C64 w/ floppy drive system would run you a around $1000. Apparently, when the C64 was discontinued in the early 90’s it was not because it was not selling well anymore but rather because the 5 1/4 floppy drive for it was costing Commodore more to produce at that point then the C64 itself. Apparently, in 1986 97% of American Commodore users used a floppy vs some 80% using the Datacasette the U.K. around the same time. I suspect that the reason for this was more U.K. Commodore purchasers where simply more budget conscious, and also saw the tape storage as good enough for home use, rather then a marked difference in price of the floppy drives vs the U.S. Though if anyone knows what the price of C64 itself vs the floppy drive was in the U.K. In the mid 80’s I would like to know.
Now, I'd like to see one of those that can play actual tapes as well as SD-cards! Maybe even a modded original tape drive that has added SD-card functionality.
Less banjos in the Deliverance soundtrack than you'd expect....
Squeal like a speccy!
I live in Australia and those people I knew who had Commodore 64s had disk drives. I think cousins from Mum's side of the family had both a cassette recorder and a disk drive for their C64, family members on Dad's side of the family only had a disk drive. Perhaps disk drives were more commonplace in Australia than they were in Europe/the UK. I knew someone who had what I think was an Amstrad CPC 464, and I think all the games were on tape, but I think they had a disk drive too.
The C64's disk-drive was also very common in New Zealand as well. I think the only time I ever used my data tape recorder was to load Zapp! 64 magazine Demo tapes :)
The sound of the Spectrum loading sounds like the noise you heard for dial up internet!
I live in the States, I had a C64 & my best friend at the time had an Atari 600xl. Both of our first storage devices were tape drives. Mine was the 1530 his was the Atari 1010 Program Recorder. to this day I still use mine & actually prefer cassettes to disk as my opinion is that cassettes are sturdy & stand the test of time WAY better than floppies. I really don't mine the 10 minute load times. LOL.
Omg I wish you let the Batman screen go all the way to the gameplay. One of my first games as a child! And used to crash more than half the time while loading. Always had to fiddle with the volume and tone knobs on the tape deck until it worked. I can't believe that even with the digital tape loader there were still tape load errors! 😱