Unless you handle the backups for a large corporation, bank, or government entity, you likely haven’t stored much data to tape recently. But magnetic storage used to be fairly mainstream back in the 1980s for all kinds of computer programs. Plenty of computers used standard cassette tapes for this too but you couldn’t just copy them with standard audio equipment. You’d need something like this 1560 datasette from [Jan].
The core problem with using Hi-Fi equipment to copy tapes storing data instead of audio is that data tapes need to be much more precise in order to avoid losses that might not be noticeable in an audio recording. In the 80s computer companies like Commodore built tape drives specifically for their computers, so [Jan]’s project uses two of these 1530 drives to build this “1560” datasette. (No working 1530 hardware was harmed in this build.) An inverter circuit in one tape deck is used to provide the signal to write the data to the other tape, reliably copying data from these data tapes in a way Hi-Fi never could.
[Jan] does lament not having something like this back in the 80s when the Commodore was in its heyday, but there’s still a dedicated retrocomputing scene for these machines that will get plenty of use out of projects like this. If you need to go the other direction in time, there are also interfaces that allow data tapes from old Commodores to be read by modern computers with USB.
Um, what? Copying game tapes was routinely done with hifi equipment back in the day. Sure, there was a chance that the copy didn’t work, but that wasn’t because the copier wasn’t good enough, just the inevitable generational loss inherent in getting a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy-of your mate’s new game, on whatever dodgy tape you had lying around.
It’s digital data so you’re spewing bs about degrading copies. Bitter truth is most people were simply incompetent to pirate games back then and are incompetent to pirate games now. Back in 1992 when I was 5 years old my father used to sell pirated music, games and fake AGD equipment imported from China. When most people would earn like $700 in a YEAR, from what he earned between 1991-1993 he built us a new home, bought new BMW (when most people would not be able to afford a used Trabant or Polonez) and I was the only kid in shcool with real GameBoy and original Kross bicycle. Sadly by 2000s the business was getting hard to do because our country joined EU and copyright law came.
While it may be interpreted as digital data, the tape is a physical medium with absolutely analogue signals. Even my own computer from the 80’s had specific precompensation in it’s tape routines to deal with some of the inherent distortion that results.
So no, it’s not BS.
It’s not digital data when on the tape and being copied used audio equipment only. That’s rather the point.
It is an audio signal on the tape. That’s purely analog.
It absolutely was a problem back then. There’s plenty of opportunity for a bad copy and for degradation over multiple copies.
It’s not that it wasn’t possible, it’s simply that success varied quite a lot. And from my personal perspective, I never got it to work on my big brother hifi system, no matter if I used a tape saved directly from the computer or a virgin tape directly from the store. Although I have to admit… at the age of 14 (when I used C64 tapes in the 80’s) simple things can be very complicated and complicated things are easily simplified. But on top of that time seems to polish our fond memories in the way we want them to remembered. Feel free to watch the video, it mentions the nuances quite clearly.
That sounds more like you just had a crap hi-fi than anything.
Hahah… that’s not unlikely, but back then I had no clue. Combined with my incompetence how to use it properly it was doomed from the start.
The problem is a fundamental one, I think.
A hi-fi set uses sine signals, while datasettes use square wave.
The reason why it worked at all was because datasettes contained lots of error correction data.
It wasn’t unusual to have same data block being repeated multiple times to ensure data integrity.
That was one of the reasons why C64 or Sharp MZ computers had so long loading times.
Using 1200 Baud for storage doesn’t help very much if the medium is being considered unreliable.
Because that’s what datasette really was, a poor and unreliable medium.
In case of the C64 the data is written exactly twice. Each 192 byte block is repeated once. Both copies are followed by a one-byte checksum (a simple XOR of the payload).
So redundancy yes, but not “lots of error correction data”. You can not do to such a tape what you could do to, say, a CD.
That said I have had great results copying ZX Spectrum tapes using consumer audio equipment. Not a C64 in the house, sorry.
I believe there was a Radio Electronics article about adding a Schmitt Trigger ship to an analog recorder output to “clean up” the signal for a C64.
I used a conventional cassette player for my Sinclair, but bought a proper 1530 for my C64 until I could afford a proper floppy drive.
The more reliable way of making a copy was to load/save individual programs on the home computer.
There also were copy programs. On Sharp computers, TapeLoad was one of them.
Unfortunately, some were located at wrong part in memory,
so that they and kernal/monitor would have been overwritten in RAM by too large tape content.
Cool that you mention this. It was the route I eventually took as a youngster to copy my friends collections of cracked games tapes. First LOAD, swap tapes, then SAVE. It took more than double the time time, but back then time was all I had and hey… it worked.
The advantage of doing a direct datasette to datasette copy rather than using a dual deck Hi-Fi is often HiFi’s have automatic recording gain, which some fastloaders exploit in order to make the copy fail. The Commodore datasette has a crude but effective ADC circuit built in for playback and the digital signal from the computer goes straight to the head when recording. Still, unless you are using decks which are closely speed matched it is still possible to make a n’th generation copy which won’t load due to the timing of the recorded signal going out of spec of the fastloader.