Maxduino Review: Tape Cassette Emulator for Multiple Retro Computers

(retrogamecoders.com)

56 points | by ibobev 5 days ago ago

8 comments

  • thijson a day ago ago

    My sister corrupted my favorite game. She pressed fast forward on the tape deck while it was playing (and loading). I think that stretched the tape, because after that the game wouldn't load anymore, it would error out.

    This happened to me in the early 80's with the family's Tandy Color Computer 1. We didn't have a disk drive, just loaded things using tape drive.

    As an aside, I think the modulation used was a simple frequency shift keying, with likely no error correction.

  • 2 days ago ago
    [deleted]
  • asdefghyk 2 days ago ago

    Why all that complication?

    Why not just play the audio on a computer speaker to a microphone and maybe a generic audio preamp board ( to get the levels right ) to the destination computer.

    Could have the speaker and microphone in a small cardboard box to avoid any audio interference ....

    • tecleandor a day ago ago

      Once you get the speaker, the mic, the cardboard box, the "finding the proper input/output level", the EQ, the "WIIIiiiIIIIiiiIIIiiiiscreeeeech" sounds...

      I don't think that device is much more complicated. Also, working with it is way way simpler. Drop the files, press play.

      • asdefghyk 15 hours ago ago

          RE   "WIIIiiiIIIIiiiIIIiiiiscreeeeech" sounds.
        
        The cardboard box would attenuate that nicely
    • qingcharles a day ago ago

      Why a speaker and mic? Why not just connect the headphone out of a PC to the audio in on the old computer?

      • a day ago ago
        [deleted]
    • flohofwoe a day ago ago

      That may work with WAV files recorded from cassette tapes, but not the various other tape file formats like TAP or TZX, those are often "shortcircuited" to skip the tunneling through sampled audio. Some of the fastloader formats are also extremely sensitive to irregularities in the signal transmission.