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@@NoelsRetroLab Also I'd say for valuable tapes like this one checking if the magnetic layer is sticky is a must before even attempting to put it into a deck. And if it is you should bake it first. And yes, the "damage" isn't really a damage, just that part of the tape absorbed water vapour throughout the ages and sticks to the heads/loses particles because of that. Tape baking is the process of drying the tape in controlled conditions. It's pretty easy to do.
For the data recovery part, using a sound card that has a LINE-IN input would be preferable to a microphone input, to avoid the eventual filters and amplifiers of the mic input. And also, trying to have the volume as high as possible for recording (like ~80%) without it being saturated/clamped.
Sanyo products used to be very reliable, so it doesn't surprise me it ended up being the best tape deck for your purposes 😁. Can't speak for anything more modern though.
OMG ! An "Elephants never forget" floppy. I used to love those...well at least I loved the ads in magazines, as I never had a disk drive at the time for my Sinclair ZX Spectrum =)
I can see two ways of recovering the data from the volume dipped portion of the recording. The simple way is to add gain to the section of audio with the dip, which can be done right in Audacity. It does not have to be perfect but you can't raise the gain so much that it would peak; it just has to be loud enough for the signal highs and lows to be detected past a threshold. The second way is how we did it back in the 1980's - throw the source cassette into the left side of your hi-fi stereo system, throw a blank cassette into the right side, bump up the EQ a few decibels across all frequency ranges, hit record on the right side, play on the left side, and enjoy some of the weirdest progressive jams you have ever heard while it transfers the data to the new cassette. Even though it is data, it is still technically audio and therefore you can manipulate it the same way as audio.
If you can't fix a wobbly sound file by processing it, say the frequency is inconsistent due to tape stretch, it's really fun writing some code to interpret the sound file, It's mostly about counting zero crossings but can take some fiddling and tuning to get right. Most tape formats I played from had little to know error checking. I guess some has a very basic checksum. The exception was the C64, which had a very overengineered format which is why C64 tape loading and saving is so ridiculously slower that other systems of the era.
Just to spread some knowledge, the type of key switches in the keyboard are of the stackpole variety. I would really like to see the PEB (Peripheral Expansion Box (the box with the disk drive)) up and running with John's game.
Awesome! I got a little bit emotionally moved, remembering how was my first time recovering games from my childhood and play them again many years later. That were my first steps in retrogaming, and I never stopped since then.
Noel, I had an old Sinclair Spectrum game on tape that went quiet in one part. I put it in Audacity went bonkers with the amplify till the quiet part was 100% and yes it clipped. I played it into the Spectrum first time after 35 years. I made a CD with the WAV file. I later found out the spectrum just counted the pulses on the tape. As long as the tape recorder amplifier does not distort you should be fine rescuing games. I hope that helps.
Nice! I did mess with that a bit, but not for very long. So maybe it's possible to do that as well. I put the wav files in the Discord channel since some people wanted to mess with them to try to do that same thing. Good to know it can work!
When testing PSUs that aren't connected to anything, try putting the multimeter into AUTO-V LoZ. This will apply a small amount of load onto the device you are testing. So the power rails are not floating and giving weird or vague results. If your testing voltage in circuit, then yes use the normal voltage modes.
Great result! TBH I was half expecting to see the Sony in use as it's an extremely reliable tape deck (I can personally vouch for that model's performance), but I loved seeing the Sanyo because it's period correct. Can't wait to see how the floppy disk recovery goes.
Hey Noel, so I've recovered exactly things like that, with low volume, you had. If you zoom in all the way in audacity you'll be able to see a pattern. For the ZX81 it's something like short and long repeating pulses (3 vs 7 maybe if I remember). So if you can glean what each section should have been (i.e. you can usually still see how long each pattern was) you can just copy a good 1 or 0 (3 vs 7 pulses from the proper volume level) in the place of the bad (low volume) sections. As long as you don't add in too much of time difference, it doesn't have to align exactly, it should be fine. Worked a treat.
I played around a bit doing that, but didn't spend much time. Maybe being really careful about when to zoom in would help. I ended up posting the wavs in the Discord channel because multiple people wanted to try restoring it 😃
Great video Noel. I recently fired up my Amstrad CPC 464 from 1985 and tried loading programs from multiple cassettes that I had back in the day. To my surprise 90% of the cassettes loaded fine.
I wasn't screaming, but I was mentally sending the message. Yeah, one of those guys who had everything your neighbour had. Synth, joysticks, PEB, _and_ a Radio Shack replacement keyboard -- the one sold back in around 86 or so.
The mental message arrived loud and clear to the past and that's how I figured it out 🤣 Seriously, I wish they had added some kind of check instead of just letting you load the wrong BASIC. Oh well. Lesson learned!
You can bake the tape slightly. Thats how they make the material adhere back to the plastic. Always with tape you keep the high at 2+ and you will get good results. Also you can still buy shells you can move the tape into. Ive noticed the spindles on older tape shells can be very heavy. Hope i helped. I have been making audio tape collages for 20 years. So im not a scientist but i know tape. Lol.
The Ozark Mountain Daredevils made some good music in their day. I remember drinking beer many an evening while listening to, "Jackie Blue" or "If You Wanna Get to Heaven". (Hey, this was in my mis-spent youth...) Standards for cassette recordings varied per country. Japan tended to record to a signal level of 0 db peak, whereas the US tended to record to -3db. Either level will work, but you may have to lower the gain on a 0db recording. Sanyo made good gear, too, especially back then. Good work on the keyboard! Those can be tricky. Later keyboards made for the Ti99-4/A had bifurcated spring switches that were individually replaceable.
This was fascinating, audio data storage is an interest of mine. Shame about that volume dip in that recording. I think it may be recoverable but would be a lot of work.
The keyboard looks to be the way the BBC Micro did it’s keys - you could thump them and the key mechanism was basically unaffected since it wasn’t the pressure of the key push that directly closed the contacts.
This was fantastic, Noel. My childhood machine was also a TI-99/4A with PEB, Speech, etc. Wrote many XB games for it. No idea what happened to it though. 😥
Audacity is such an amazing piece of free software, man. It's so flexible, is capable of so much and it just WORKS. I've used it for a thousand purposes. Puts a lot of paid software to shame imho.
through audio editing i believe it's not really hard to restore that faulty area of the tape, i'm used to that kind of stuff in sound design and restoration, you can start by trying to just normalize the volume applying the "inverse" curve carefully... there are many ways, and it would be very useful to understand what's supposed to be the right wafeform for 1's and zeros ...
I did the same with my first (unfinished) childhood game the other day. Transfered it from the CPC6128 disk to the PC 30 years later. I feel for the guy :-)
Great video as always Noel. I would be interested in watching a video of you fixing the cassette recorders. I have a retro cassette datacorder that doesn't work and it would be cool to gain some insight on how to fix it.
I think you can recover the damaged datafile, should not be too hard if it still contains all the data but only in a lower volume Can't test it but I would give it a try myself if I had the track.
Imagine restoring teenage boy's computer from today in 40 years, lol. "Billy, you know that old SSD you had in your laptop you just gave me? Well, I restored ALL the data and we're gonna look at it for the first time in my RUclips video!" Billy: NOOOOOOoooooooooooooo!
The TI-99 puts 12 V on the line the C64 uses for luma, so don't use an S-Video or the Luma connection on a 1702 or similar since the 12 V can damage the monitor. The key switches on that keyboard are an early type made by Hi-Tek. They have a weakness where the white square plastic plungers break in some or all of the 4 corners so that they can't retain the keycaps. The sides also splay out and get stuck in their sockets. I have a PET and and Heathkit terminal using the same keyswitches and they all have loose keycaps or sticking keys because of this. TI-99/4As are the only source for period replacement of these plungers that I've found (although TI used several different kind of keyboards, so it's a gamble when buying one that you'll get a Hi-Tek keyboard.) I'm working on a 3D printed replacement, but I haven't got anything to work satisfactorily yet.
Good point about the s-video cable! Interesting about the white plastic. I must have been lucky with this one because they're all in perfect condition as far as I can tell, but yeah, having a 3D-printed replacement would be awesome.
Sure, that'd be fun! Are you on Discord? It would be easiest to share and talk about that there without getting lost in the comments: discord.gg/ETcCh6J
I had recovered all my oric and zx81 tapes with my CPC. Later when I transferred my amstrad disks to my PC, I was finally able to run all this in emulators 🥰
@@NoelsRetroLab I just made a routine in asm that read the k7 input like the CPC routine does. It must use the same type of signals. For the oric I had the format used by the rom and for the ZX81 I guessed the format.
Man, my TI99/4A is still sitting in a box with the games, controllers and tape player/recorder. Haven't used it in forever. I even still have some of those same books, dug them up to go with my other books. Nice to see how it is on the inside though. Some day I'll load it up, thanks to that restoration bit.
Great job! And the TI with NTSC is a nice companion for the PAL one. ;-) I'm envious that you've got the original PEB now! Great fun watching a new video, I wished you would make videos more often though,
The Memory full error may be the result of loading a TI BASIC program into Extended BASIC. Judging by the partial listing you showed this is a TI BASIC game rather than Extended BASIC. The available RAM in Extended BASIC is slightly smaller because part of the RAM is used to keep sprite data (there are other incompatibilities, like some character sets that are not available but these result in other errors rather than Memory Full).
Doh! So that was the opposite problem than I had with the other one. Hahaha... I wish they had added a version number to the BASIC listing and printed an error if it didn't match. It would have been one more byte!! 😃 Thanks. I'll have to try it again.
I did try it, but it was a low-effort approach. Obviously it doesn't work if my amplification happens to be in the middle of a bit. I tried a couple of quick things and none of them worked. And once I zoomed in, I saw that some sections were pretty much gone, so I think there's some data fundamentally missing (which we may be able to fix decoding all other data).
as a youngster, i get the feeling of nostalgia for things i experienced not many years ago. How nice it must have been to bring back memories from more than three decades ago. love it
The volume dip or data corruption is a typical problem with old tapes when not rewound completely. Otherwise they can be fine even after decades. Also cassettes certified for data (tested for no oxide dropout) where better in the long run.
@NoelsRetroLab there is still a very active community around this computer- there are "TIPI" add ons available that can use a Raspberry Pi to emulate that big heavy expansion box and access online resources.
Wow... You deal with things so different than me. I would have just stuck the tape in a tape drive and loaded that sucker. Spoiled by the really reliable C64 Dataset, but my tapes from 1981 (VIC-20) and my C64 tapes have had about a 99% success rate for being read.
Wow. I thought I was watching someone with 1,000,000+ subscribers. Pretty shocking to see you only have 48.7K, especially with quality content like this. Keep up the good work!
You could try using a compressor to restore the dip of the destroyed signal. However this sounds like the higher frequencies have disappeared also... Maybe a spectral repair program like RX or SpectraLayers could help restoring the signal.
I made a game as kid with my mate, lost all the data files but I did print out the basic source code. Fondly remember we found function libraries that could display gif images and sprites. The math got too much for me so now I'm just some dumb arse electrician who dabbles with electronics. It's pretty full on learning all the skill sets!
UK computer enthusiasts discovered the same thing as John - cheap tape players work way better than more expensive ones. UK department store Boots bought thousands of new old stock 1960s dictation cassette playback machines to sell alongside the ZX Spectrum and they were noted for their reliability. They were literally the cheapest tape playback machine boots could find. Alan Sugar then found who made the cheapest mono tape mechanisms in Japan and got them even cheaper than that by ordering them in bulk to add into the CPC464 model.
Your contact's statement about cheap tape decks working better than expensive ones is supported by the Timex Sinclair 1000 user manual. I'm hoping to put this to the test once I've finished repairing my Sony hi-fi deck. Right now, I have a Panasonic shoebox deck from the 2000s which doesn't work too well, and a Timex Sinclair cassette player that does the job when volume and tone are around 7-9.
I cannot tell you how many unfinished BASIC games I had on cassette tapes back in my Commodore 64 days. Sadly, the last time I tried to load some of them on my old C64 in my parent's attic about half of them were corrupted. But that's kind of to be expected with cassette tape or just about any magnetic media storage.
Just ran across this video and the tape brande brought me back. All my ZX81 programs are on the same type brand (they came in packs of 5 with different colors). So cool! Fond memories of programming on my friend's TI99!
I had one of those Sanyo tape recorders in the past, kind of wondering if I still have it somewhere, I know I have an ITT "Professional" recorder and a modern Sony one too, but I don't recall whether the Sanyo stuck around... :\
The TI99/4A was my first computer. You could change all characters in graphics using Hex codes (CALL CHAR). Still a star in Hex codes because of it. Filled entire graph books with 8*8 artworks. Now working in the PLC industry this knowledge is still valuable.
That unrecoverabledata on that cassette tape with two missing parts,might be recoverable trough ai data reconstruction speculation,by adding all possible combinations of ones & zeros withing those small sections to fill in those gaps, Sure there might by hundrdeds or thousands of possible end results but if one of it became the right one,that would be great,so why not. So let’s say that if 8bits of data missing due huge use of a cassette tape or disk,than there’re 256 possible combinations for ai data recovery to phill in that gap with it,sothat in one of those 256 end results of those speculated roms became the intended one,so who ever knows what ai data recovery could do😁
I had a hacky solution with a VRM from an Arduino kit and a 12v adapter to power my RC2014. Failing high... is not good. 5v circuits do not like 8v+(it was 8v when I started moving to disconnect, but it read 11ish after disconnect, not sure what hit the computer). I should have checked the current limits of the VRM I was using, if I had, I might still have a VRM(let out the magic smoke) and a VGA terminal board(did not let out the smoke, but it doesn't connect to a keyboard or output video) Thankfully my core modules survived, at least. It works over a serial link.
In 1986, Farmers Trading Company put out a line of computors that ran Basic, programs could be saved on tape. $1500. Okay. So I applied for an FTC card. It took too long and I went off the idea. Basic was still the best way to go for me though. A few years later, Playstation brought Basic on their PS2. Brilliant. I haven't stopped since. Especially when a progammer transferred for use for the PC. His version is better than an official version.
Amazing stuff Noel, I can't wait to see what you find on those floppy disks! The game John described sounds like some sort of artillery game, looking forward to his reaction if you discover that one :)
I wrote a lot of games back in the '80s on an Atari 800XL. Being stupid kids, we gave it all away in 1994. At the time it seemed like we had had it FOREVER ... a whopping 11yrs. And that was now 29yrs ago :-/ ... my brother and I still talk about those games, and I still remember the long cool summer nights, the endless rounds of coding and testing and revising.
my first computer was A TI-99 4A also. I had the extended basic cartridge,and the speech synthesizer. but not the memory expansion / Floppy Disk drive. I spent hours writing programs for it. I miss it 😪 but now I code with Liberty Basic. which works on a modern windows computer.
There might be a digital copy of that tape online, somewhere. A lot of old 8-bit computers have online archives going back to the 80s. It might be possible to recreate a good copy of that program by copying the digital data onto a new cassette tape.
Restoring and collecting makes for a good Video, but inviting the previous owner to share some memories of the Device really does it for me, I love it!
The audio is not fully gone. Use dynamic range compression and EQ. It would be easier to do that in a DAW than in Audacity, you can experiment first in real time to find parameters, then use automation to draw parameter changes since the changes are dynamic and change over time. For a DAW i suggest Reaper as it is free-to-try forever (and non commercial license costs 60$, if you remember WinAmp.. Reaper is made by the same developer..and they are super cool so well worth the support.. it is also just 15mb install file which is ridiculous for maybe the best DAW on the market.). Unfortunately the data is modulated, so there is no guarantee but there could be enough to make it work. There are also other options, like deliberately clipping the audio a bit. I would also capture the audio from the tape again, with different levels and adjust the play head azimuth angle as that has a HUGE effect. I would actually like to take a look at the audio files, i'm sound engineer by trade, with electronics background and was tinkering with 8 bit computers in the 80s.
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There should be more restoration stories with a human element like this... great stuff.
Noel, I would love to see you repairing an old tape recorder.
Cool! You're not the first one to say that, so I'll probably sneak it in at some point.
Great idea! I haven't seen any retro channel try it before.
@@NoelsRetroLab I think it's crucial for you to look into "tape baking" process for cases like that.
@@NoelsRetroLab Also I'd say for valuable tapes like this one checking if the magnetic layer is sticky is a must before even attempting to put it into a deck. And if it is you should bake it first. And yes, the "damage" isn't really a damage, just that part of the tape absorbed water vapour throughout the ages and sticks to the heads/loses particles because of that. Tape baking is the process of drying the tape in controlled conditions. It's pretty easy to do.
@@andrewdunbar828 Usually the culpit is rubber drive bands that go bad, which there is a lot of videos of. But by all means, one more doesn't hurt.
Excellent episode. Nice mix of a restoration along with some data recovery. Restoring an old cassette recorder would be great.
For the data recovery part, using a sound card that has a LINE-IN input would be preferable to a microphone input, to avoid the eventual filters and amplifiers of the mic input.
And also, trying to have the volume as high as possible for recording (like ~80%) without it being saturated/clamped.
Good luck with the floppy recovery! Your work with the tape recovery was really impressive!
Thank you! I'll be my first time doing a deep recovery of a floppy, so that should be fun.
Sanyo products used to be very reliable, so it doesn't surprise me it ended up being the best tape deck for your purposes 😁. Can't speak for anything more modern though.
Yeah, pretty amazing that I didn't even have to change the drive belt. They don't make them like the used to!
OMG ! An "Elephants never forget" floppy. I used to love those...well at least I loved the ads in magazines, as I never had a disk drive at the time for my Sinclair ZX Spectrum =)
Ha yeah, I'd have totally forgotten about that brand, until the logo appeared!
Had some on the bbc we had :)
I can see two ways of recovering the data from the volume dipped portion of the recording. The simple way is to add gain to the section of audio with the dip, which can be done right in Audacity. It does not have to be perfect but you can't raise the gain so much that it would peak; it just has to be loud enough for the signal highs and lows to be detected past a threshold.
The second way is how we did it back in the 1980's - throw the source cassette into the left side of your hi-fi stereo system, throw a blank cassette into the right side, bump up the EQ a few decibels across all frequency ranges, hit record on the right side, play on the left side, and enjoy some of the weirdest progressive jams you have ever heard while it transfers the data to the new cassette. Even though it is data, it is still technically audio and therefore you can manipulate it the same way as audio.
If you can't fix a wobbly sound file by processing it, say the frequency is inconsistent due to tape stretch, it's really fun writing some code to interpret the sound file, It's mostly about counting zero crossings but can take some fiddling and tuning to get right.
Most tape formats I played from had little to know error checking. I guess some has a very basic checksum. The exception was the C64, which had a very overengineered format which is why C64 tape loading and saving is so ridiculously slower that other systems of the era.
I love the way it starts up almost instantly.
Tape access anxiety is a real thing!
Oh boy, this brings me back... I had 3 copies of every program I made.
Yeah, it is isn't it? You just never know when it's going to stop working.
Just to spread some knowledge, the type of key switches in the keyboard are of the stackpole variety. I would really like to see the PEB (Peripheral Expansion Box (the box with the disk drive)) up and running with John's game.
Yes, please do a video on restoring the Cassette Tape Players.
Really interesting to see the process. That TI99 brings back some (very old) memories!
Awesome! I got a little bit emotionally moved, remembering how was my first time recovering games from my childhood and play them again many years later. That were my first steps in retrogaming, and I never stopped since then.
great video Noel ! and i love the chicken train section, so funny ! and even better, an Amstrad CPC 6128 to help with the rescue
Of course! Any time I need a third computer to do something else... chances are I'm going to lean on an Amstrad 😃
Noel, I had an old Sinclair Spectrum game on tape that went quiet in one part. I put it in Audacity went bonkers with the amplify till the quiet part was 100% and yes it clipped. I played it into the Spectrum first time after 35 years. I made a CD with the WAV file. I later found out the spectrum just counted the pulses on the tape. As long as the tape recorder amplifier does not distort you should be fine rescuing games. I hope that helps.
Nice! I did mess with that a bit, but not for very long. So maybe it's possible to do that as well. I put the wav files in the Discord channel since some people wanted to mess with them to try to do that same thing. Good to know it can work!
When testing PSUs that aren't connected to anything, try putting the multimeter into AUTO-V LoZ. This will apply a small amount of load onto the device you are testing. So the power rails are not floating and giving weird or vague results.
If your testing voltage in circuit, then yes use the normal voltage modes.
That's really cool. I didn't know about that mode. I'll try it. Thanks!
Great result! TBH I was half expecting to see the Sony in use as it's an extremely reliable tape deck (I can personally vouch for that model's performance), but I loved seeing the Sanyo because it's period correct. Can't wait to see how the floppy disk recovery goes.
Right. My head said the Sony. My heart said the Sanyo. Heart won 😃
Hey Noel, so I've recovered exactly things like that, with low volume, you had. If you zoom in all the way in audacity you'll be able to see a pattern. For the ZX81 it's something like short and long repeating pulses (3 vs 7 maybe if I remember). So if you can glean what each section should have been (i.e. you can usually still see how long each pattern was) you can just copy a good 1 or 0 (3 vs 7 pulses from the proper volume level) in the place of the bad (low volume) sections. As long as you don't add in too much of time difference, it doesn't have to align exactly, it should be fine. Worked a treat.
I played around a bit doing that, but didn't spend much time. Maybe being really careful about when to zoom in would help. I ended up posting the wavs in the Discord channel because multiple people wanted to try restoring it 😃
@@NoelsRetroLab Did anyone manage to restore it in the end?
Yes. Stay tuned a few more days.
That TI-99 is such a beautiful machine and that Trinitron is clean. John really hooked you up! Great vid and look forward to seeing the next episode.
Yeah, sure about the tape player repair videos ! That's always interesting !
Great video Noel. I recently fired up my Amstrad CPC 464 from 1985 and tried loading programs from multiple cassettes that I had back in the day.
To my surprise 90% of the cassettes loaded fine.
I wasn't screaming, but I was mentally sending the message. Yeah, one of those guys who had everything your neighbour had. Synth, joysticks, PEB, _and_ a Radio Shack replacement keyboard -- the one sold back in around 86 or so.
The mental message arrived loud and clear to the past and that's how I figured it out 🤣 Seriously, I wish they had added some kind of check instead of just letting you load the wrong BASIC. Oh well. Lesson learned!
@@NoelsRetroLab Alternatively, one could read the tape label a little better next time... ;-)
You can bake the tape slightly. Thats how they make the material adhere back to the plastic. Always with tape you keep the high at 2+ and you will get good results. Also you can still buy shells you can move the tape into. Ive noticed the spindles on older tape shells can be very heavy. Hope i helped. I have been making audio tape collages for 20 years. So im not a scientist but i know tape. Lol.
The Ozark Mountain Daredevils made some good music in their day. I remember drinking beer many an evening while listening to, "Jackie Blue" or "If You Wanna Get to Heaven". (Hey, this was in my mis-spent youth...)
Standards for cassette recordings varied per country. Japan tended to record to a signal level of 0 db peak, whereas the US tended to record to -3db. Either level will work, but you may have to lower the gain on a 0db recording. Sanyo made good gear, too, especially back then.
Good work on the keyboard! Those can be tricky. Later keyboards made for the Ti99-4/A had bifurcated spring switches that were individually replaceable.
This was fascinating, audio data storage is an interest of mine. Shame about that volume dip in that recording. I think it may be recoverable but would be a lot of work.
The keyboard looks to be the way the BBC Micro did it’s keys - you could thump them and the key mechanism was basically unaffected since it wasn’t the pressure of the key push that directly closed the contacts.
That's such a nice idea. Kudos to you!
_This_ is what it should all be about! *Bringing back happy, geeky memories.*
Nice job. It's so hard backing up old cassettes onto modern computers. They seem to amplify tape hiss and exaggerate drop-out.
This was fantastic, Noel. My childhood machine was also a TI-99/4A with PEB, Speech, etc. Wrote many XB games for it. No idea what happened to it though. 😥
Audacity is such an amazing piece of free software, man. It's so flexible, is capable of so much and it just WORKS. I've used it for a thousand purposes. Puts a lot of paid software to shame imho.
Very, very true!
This is a beautiful work :)
Technology is getting to the level where a computer can be reunited with its childhood neighbour
through audio editing i believe it's not really hard to restore that faulty area of the tape, i'm used to that kind of stuff in sound design and restoration, you can start by trying to just normalize the volume applying the "inverse" curve carefully... there are many ways, and it would be very useful to understand what's supposed to be the right wafeform for 1's and zeros ...
This guy John was an absolute legend. He wanted his childhood TI to find the best home possible.
I did the same with my first (unfinished) childhood game the other day. Transfered it from the CPC6128 disk to the PC 30 years later. I feel for the guy :-)
Great video as always Noel. I would be interested in watching a video of you fixing the cassette recorders. I have a retro cassette datacorder that doesn't work and it would be cool to gain some insight on how to fix it.
I think you can recover the damaged datafile, should not be too hard if it still contains all the data but only in a lower volume Can't test it but I would give it a try myself if I had the track.
Oh gosh, the _memories_ this brought back!
i have a black radio shack tape player which i have yet to test. it came with my coco 2. but no tapes, only cartridges.
Its so heart harming watch the man nostalgia seeing his childhood games:)
Damn, John! Your Boy hooked it Up!
Thats awesome!
The tape says Dogfight and Quest, great video!
looks like 3 places where the audio really gets low, and each one only 3 or 4 bits at most.
John! my first computer was a TI99!! hahaha! this is fantastic!! you have a great neighbor!!! :D:D:D -Cholly
Yes I do!
Yes, please repair the Radio Shack ones, I used to own the black one.
Imagine restoring teenage boy's computer from today in 40 years, lol.
"Billy, you know that old SSD you had in your laptop you just gave me? Well, I restored ALL the data and we're gonna look at it for the first time in my RUclips video!"
Billy: NOOOOOOoooooooooooooo!
🤣🤣🤣
The TI-99 puts 12 V on the line the C64 uses for luma, so don't use an S-Video or the Luma connection on a 1702 or similar since the 12 V can damage the monitor.
The key switches on that keyboard are an early type made by Hi-Tek. They have a weakness where the white square plastic plungers break in some or all of the 4 corners so that they can't retain the keycaps. The sides also splay out and get stuck in their sockets. I have a PET and and Heathkit terminal using the same keyswitches and they all have loose keycaps or sticking keys because of this. TI-99/4As are the only source for period replacement of these plungers that I've found (although TI used several different kind of keyboards, so it's a gamble when buying one that you'll get a Hi-Tek keyboard.) I'm working on a 3D printed replacement, but I haven't got anything to work satisfactorily yet.
Good point about the s-video cable! Interesting about the white plastic. I must have been lucky with this one because they're all in perfect condition as far as I can tell, but yeah, having a 3D-printed replacement would be awesome.
i have no clue if i could do it, but, if you upload the audio i would be interested to look at it and see if i can make it readable.
Sure, that'd be fun! Are you on Discord? It would be easiest to share and talk about that there without getting lost in the comments: discord.gg/ETcCh6J
@@NoelsRetroLab okies im in !
I had recovered all my oric and zx81 tapes with my CPC. Later when I transferred my amstrad disks to my PC, I was finally able to run all this in emulators 🥰
Interesting! How did you use the CPC to recover those tapes? Did you digitize them somehow?
@@NoelsRetroLab I just made a routine in asm that read the k7 input like the CPC routine does. It must use the same type of signals. For the oric I had the format used by the rom and for the ZX81 I guessed the format.
Man, my TI99/4A is still sitting in a box with the games, controllers and tape player/recorder. Haven't used it in forever. I even still have some of those same books, dug them up to go with my other books. Nice to see how it is on the inside though. Some day I'll load it up, thanks to that restoration bit.
What are you waiting for? Give it a try! 😃
That corrupted tape file looks very recoverable actually.
Probably. I posted the wav in the Discord channel in case anyone is interested in playing with it.
Great job! And the TI with NTSC is a nice companion for the PAL one. ;-) I'm envious that you've got the original PEB now! Great fun watching a new video, I wished you would make videos more often though,
Thanks! Yeah, I wish I could make videos more often too 😃 Next year I'm hoping to devote more time to this. We'll see.
The Memory full error may be the result of loading a TI BASIC program into Extended BASIC. Judging by the partial listing you showed this is a TI BASIC game rather than Extended BASIC. The available RAM in Extended BASIC is slightly smaller because part of the RAM is used to keep sprite data (there are other incompatibilities, like some character sets that are not available but these result in other errors rather than Memory Full).
Doh! So that was the opposite problem than I had with the other one. Hahaha... I wish they had added a version number to the BASIC listing and printed an error if it didn't match. It would have been one more byte!! 😃 Thanks. I'll have to try it again.
It also looked like the computer came with the PEB and so it is very possible that there is a 32K memory expansion card inside.
@@tedthrasher9433 This is also true, although if it is TI BASIC (as it looks) rather than Extended, it cannot take advantage of the memory expansion.
I had Cauldron on my colour CPC 464 - loved that game 🙂
Wonderful Noel, great job!!! Hope to see you working on those Floppy Disks soon :-) Greetings, Michael
Thank you! Yes, looking forward to some floppy disk archaeology now!
Ozark Mountain Daredevils Chicken Train would be a great name for a game.
Right? Someone make it now!
You should make a Short about the key mechanism.
This man is overnecessarily good looking. wow.
No real comment. I'm just enjoying the clickety click clickety of my new keyboard 😃 I'll watch the video now. I'm sure it will be good 👀
You gave up on the low volume section without trying to compensate in Audacity? And why didn't the tape expert suggest trying that?
I did try it, but it was a low-effort approach. Obviously it doesn't work if my amplification happens to be in the middle of a bit. I tried a couple of quick things and none of them worked. And once I zoomed in, I saw that some sections were pretty much gone, so I think there's some data fundamentally missing (which we may be able to fix decoding all other data).
as a youngster, i get the feeling of nostalgia for things i experienced not many years ago. How nice it must have been to bring back memories from more than three decades ago. love it
The volume dip or data corruption is a typical problem with old tapes when not rewound completely. Otherwise they can be fine even after decades. Also cassettes certified for data (tested for no oxide dropout) where better in the long run.
Nice to see a computer I never saw working...
Wow, I had a powerful dose of nostalgia when I saw that elephant memory logo
The Disk Drive expansion box will have 32k memory expansion. Please make a second video with the Expansion box.
Oh yes, absolutely! I'll make a video about that and recovering those floppies (or trying to anyway).
@NoelsRetroLab there is still a very active community around this computer- there are "TIPI" add ons available that can use a Raspberry Pi to emulate that big heavy expansion box and access online resources.
Yes, I’d also love to see you restore those two Radio Shack cassette recorders, please.
Yes, a video of tape player repair!
Wow... You deal with things so different than me. I would have just stuck the tape in a tape drive and loaded that sucker. Spoiled by the really reliable C64 Dataset, but my tapes from 1981 (VIC-20) and my C64 tapes have had about a 99% success rate for being read.
Wow. I thought I was watching someone with 1,000,000+ subscribers. Pretty shocking to see you only have 48.7K, especially with quality content like this. Keep up the good work!
Thank you! I really appreciate the comment! 😃
I definitely want to see a Radio Shack tape recorder repair video.
Please post wavefile somewhere so people can have chance to restore the program
OK, I just posted it on the Discord server since several people asked for it. discord.gg/ETcCh6J
Very nice! :)
You could try using a compressor to restore the dip of the destroyed signal. However this sounds like the higher frequencies have disappeared also... Maybe a spectral repair program like RX or SpectraLayers could help restoring the signal.
See you and John are smarter than me. I am still looking for the “any” key, still can’t find it.
🤣🤣
@@NoelsRetroLab jokes aside it was cool to see that stuff again
those tv's are nice.
I've got that Sony cassette recorder or a very similar one (Sony TCM-818), I bought it to use with my BBC Micro B probably in the early 90's.
I made a game as kid with my mate, lost all the data files but I did print out the basic source code. Fondly remember we found function libraries that could display gif images and sprites. The math got too much for me so now I'm just some dumb arse electrician who dabbles with electronics. It's pretty full on learning all the skill sets!
UK computer enthusiasts discovered the same thing as John - cheap tape players work way better than more expensive ones. UK department store Boots bought thousands of new old stock 1960s dictation cassette playback machines to sell alongside the ZX Spectrum and they were noted for their reliability. They were literally the cheapest tape playback machine boots could find. Alan Sugar then found who made the cheapest mono tape mechanisms in Japan and got them even cheaper than that by ordering them in bulk to add into the CPC464 model.
Your contact's statement about cheap tape decks working better than expensive ones is supported by the Timex Sinclair 1000 user manual. I'm hoping to put this to the test once I've finished repairing my Sony hi-fi deck. Right now, I have a Panasonic shoebox deck from the 2000s which doesn't work too well, and a Timex Sinclair cassette player that does the job when volume and tone are around 7-9.
I cannot tell you how many unfinished BASIC games I had on cassette tapes back in my Commodore 64 days. Sadly, the last time I tried to load some of them on my old C64 in my parent's attic about half of them were corrupted. But that's kind of to be expected with cassette tape or just about any magnetic media storage.
TI99/4a was my first home micro in the UK, before getting my beloved CPC464 .... would love to get another PAL TI99/4a... and my CPC464 fixed!
Just ran across this video and the tape brande brought me back. All my ZX81 programs are on the same type brand (they came in packs of 5 with different colors). So cool! Fond memories of programming on my friend's TI99!
I had one of those Sanyo tape recorders in the past, kind of wondering if I still have it somewhere, I know I have an ITT "Professional" recorder and a modern Sony one too, but I don't recall whether the Sanyo stuck around... :\
The TI99/4A was my first computer. You could change all characters in graphics using Hex codes (CALL CHAR). Still a star in Hex codes because of it. Filled entire graph books with 8*8 artworks. Now working in the PLC industry this knowledge is still valuable.
That unrecoverabledata on that cassette tape with two missing parts,might be recoverable trough ai data reconstruction speculation,by adding all possible combinations of ones & zeros withing those small sections to fill in those gaps,
Sure there might by hundrdeds or thousands of possible end results but if one of it became the right one,that would be great,so why not.
So let’s say that if 8bits of data missing due huge use of a cassette tape or disk,than there’re 256 possible combinations for ai data recovery to phill in that gap with it,sothat in one of those 256 end results of those speculated roms became the intended one,so who ever knows what ai data recovery could do😁
I had a hacky solution with a VRM from an Arduino kit and a 12v adapter to power my RC2014.
Failing high... is not good. 5v circuits do not like 8v+(it was 8v when I started moving to disconnect, but it read 11ish after disconnect, not sure what hit the computer). I should have checked the current limits of the VRM I was using, if I had, I might still have a VRM(let out the magic smoke) and a VGA terminal board(did not let out the smoke, but it doesn't connect to a keyboard or output video)
Thankfully my core modules survived, at least. It works over a serial link.
That was my exact setup.... brings back fond memories
Even had the PEB with the same disks! Oh wow
The choices were slim back in the day!
In 1986, Farmers Trading Company put out a line of computors that ran Basic, programs could be saved on tape.
$1500. Okay. So I applied for an FTC card. It took too long and I went off the idea.
Basic was still the best way to go for me though. A few years later, Playstation brought Basic on their PS2. Brilliant.
I haven't stopped since. Especially when a progammer transferred for use for the PC. His version is better than an official version.
Amazing stuff Noel, I can't wait to see what you find on those floppy disks! The game John described sounds like some sort of artillery game, looking forward to his reaction if you discover that one :)
Yeah, reminds me of "Tank Wars" on the old DOS PC times the way he described it. Looking forward to that little gem finding the light of day.
The Amiga 500 "Space Invaders keyboard" has a similar mechanism. The only difference is that it has 3 metal elements in each side.
Interesting! I wasn't familiar with that keyboard type on the Amiga. The contacts look much smaller, but same principle. Neat!
I wrote a lot of games back in the '80s on an Atari 800XL. Being stupid kids, we gave it all away in 1994. At the time it seemed like we had had it FOREVER ... a whopping 11yrs. And that was now 29yrs ago :-/ ... my brother and I still talk about those games, and I still remember the long cool summer nights, the endless rounds of coding and testing and revising.
my first computer was A TI-99 4A also. I had the extended basic cartridge,and the speech synthesizer.
but not the memory expansion / Floppy Disk drive. I spent hours writing programs for it. I miss it 😪
but now I code with Liberty Basic. which works on a modern windows computer.
There might be a digital copy of that tape online, somewhere. A lot of old 8-bit computers have online archives going back to the 80s.
It might be possible to recreate a good copy of that program by copying the digital data onto a new cassette tape.
"Pirated games" - REALLY? You threw your friend under the bus? Damn dude.
Restoring and collecting makes for a good Video, but inviting the previous owner to share some memories of the Device really does it for me, I love it!
The audio is not fully gone. Use dynamic range compression and EQ. It would be easier to do that in a DAW than in Audacity, you can experiment first in real time to find parameters, then use automation to draw parameter changes since the changes are dynamic and change over time. For a DAW i suggest Reaper as it is free-to-try forever (and non commercial license costs 60$, if you remember WinAmp.. Reaper is made by the same developer..and they are super cool so well worth the support.. it is also just 15mb install file which is ridiculous for maybe the best DAW on the market.). Unfortunately the data is modulated, so there is no guarantee but there could be enough to make it work. There are also other options, like deliberately clipping the audio a bit.
I would also capture the audio from the tape again, with different levels and adjust the play head azimuth angle as that has a HUGE effect. I would actually like to take a look at the audio files, i'm sound engineer by trade, with electronics background and was tinkering with 8 bit computers in the 80s.