Comments on: Commodore Cassettes

By: Greg Kennedy

Greg Kennedy — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 18:18:10 +0000

Some tools here to make .TAP files from (or to) .WAVs:
http://c64tapes.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=links

.TAP is a tape-format that encodes the digital data preserved in the audio signals. Using this you can “clean up” a tape by dumping it, making a TAP, then regenerating a WAV. Or you can share the .TAPs and others can use them. The filesize is of course ridiculously tiny.

By: Steve Davis

Steve Davis — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 20:26:38 +0000

http://www.pccm.be/museum/museum%20uitleg%20trs%2080%20klein%20model_bestanden/Bobsolete_bestanden/trs80pc1_bestanden/trs80pc1.jpg

I remember programming ‘Horse Race’ On something similar to this back in the cave man days of computers. The horses were the four card symbols (heart, club, spade and diamond) they would flash one at a time across the screen from left to right and would announce: (symbol) WINNER!
That was the coolest thing. Gawd, how easily entertained we all were back then…

By: Joshua Risner

Joshua Risner — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:54:10 +0000

An old friend of mine had an Atari 800 with a cassette drive. I remember loading up Zaxxon, typing cload, going downstairs to watch cartoons, and coming back up to play. Seemed like an eternity for that to load.

By: Stephen B

Stephen B — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:51:24 +0000

I received my C64 on Christmas 84. The computer worked for half a day. The day after Christmas, my dad fought the crowds and got it exchanged. I got the C64, datasette, a couple of joysticks and Pitstop on cartridge. I used the datasette for probably a year. Prior to getting a disk drive, the majority of my programs came from books and magazines where I had to type them in. While some aspects were a pain, sometimes we would encounter pure goodness after spending hours typing in a program. TurboTape which appeared as a type in program in early 85 made living with the Datasette much better.

By: Rob O.

Rob O. — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 21:18:24 +0000

By the way, my first modem (also for that Atari computer) was 300 baud – but you could downshift to 150 if that was too fast!

By: Rob O.

Rob O. — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 21:17:03 +0000

I started out with an Atari 800 that used a cassette data drive. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…

By: Ice Cream Jonsey

Ice Cream Jonsey — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 19:13:41 +0000

@Rob: Excellent. I’m in. I’m in!!

By: Commodore Computer Club

Commodore Computer Club — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 18:21:21 +0000

@Rob: It’s awesome when you do posts like this one, especially related to Commodore goodness :)

I still keep my datasette around for kicks, or to show kids of today how lucky they are with high speed internet.

Speaking of slow, 300 baud modems were slow. Start a download, go to bed and hope it was done by morning or that the person running the BBS didn’t need to use the phone and disconnect the modem. hehe.

Just think Rob, most of us from the Commodore computer generation (early 1980’s) are the last generation to remember when there wasn’t an internet. Crazy.

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:19:53 +0000

Man, I love posts like this one that bring some of my best friends out of the digital closet. I love you guys!

I can’t remember if I paid for my Datasette or if someone just gave one to me. Most people who originally owned Datasettes and upgraded to floppy drives had no use for the old cassette units, once they migrated all their cassette programs to floppy disks.

It looks like most of your experiences (“I had one for a couple of months and then upgraded”) match mine. Again I am limiting this to my own experiences, but I never met anyone who used one after 1985 or so. To me, “Commodore Guy using a Datasette” back then is like “Computer User using WebTV Box” today.

@ICJ: If I get it working, I will get a PayPal pool for a round of HORSE RACE and will video record the results.

By: Commodore Computer Club

Commodore Computer Club — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 07:26:51 +0000

I remember getting my first C64 Christmas 1983 and I also got a datasette. I was 11 at the time and recall saying to my grand parents who gave me the wonderful gift of Commodore that the datasette was super slow. A few weeks later I had a 1541 disk drive which I helped pay for with my savings from doing yard work, etc. It would be cool to see if your tapes still worked. I recently pulled out my datasette and loaded Robbers Of The Lost Tomb… it took about 10 minutes before I could actually play the game. Yep, back into the closet it went after that :)