Copying Commodore 64 cassettes to my PC pretty much covers what I’ve been doing over the past few months.
A cursory glance at my C64 collection revealed I have a third as many “blank” cassettes – that is, shop-bought cassettes optimized for data – as I have published games on the same medium. These files represent a big chunk of my early computing, and include graphic files, game projects on SEUCK and Graphic Adventure Creator, and type-ins in various stages of completion.
To begin the process of copying the cassettes, I spent some money on a device called the 1530USB. This is an adapter that acts as an interface between the Commodore 1530 C2N Datasette (which typically shipped with a Commodore 64) and my PC’s USB port.
(If you don’t own a C2N, you can use a standard tape player and cable for this.)
The idea then is to record the data in Audacity (a free and open-source audio editor) as it plays through the cable. This can then be converted to TAP format (using additional software), and run in an emulator – VICE is your best bet there.
Linux Format
Now it so happens that I was commissioned by Linux Format magazine to write a guide on this process, so I can’t go into it in too much detail here.
However, I was quite excited to share a photo and several zoomed-in images here to give you an idea of what to expect.
This gallery should be pretty self-explanatory, but I’ll add some context.
In the first image, the Datasette is missing the slot cover; we don’t know were that went. Also, the interior needed a lot of cleaning.
In the second image, there is a short wire attached to the Datasette’s cable. We acquired the device around 1988 after the original (possibly a Maxtor) broke. We don’t know what this wire is for – possible earth, possibly something esle.
In the final image, you can see the screenshot of a game. The BREAK message is accidental – I hit ESC (the equivalent of the C64’s RUN/STOP) when attempting to make a screenshot a few moments before.
The mystery of missing cassettes
Now while I cannot go in-depth with this here, I can tell you that the material that I will be submitting is different to the draft I currently have stored on my computer. Initially, I was basing the article around a game called The Mystery of Silver Mountain, a type-in published by Usbourne that took up a lot of my 8-bit computing life.
However, the cassette I found that was labelled as such was nothing of the sort, which is why I had to switch to the fall-back option of one of my dad’s cassettes. This features type-ins either from a magazine or from one of the computer programming books we owned, but does the job of demonstrating how the whole process works.
I’ll finish with this: I’ve been doing this for a few months now and using Linux (you can do it with a Raspberry Pi too, I understand) is fine. However, there is software called AudioTap that does the WAV to TAP conversion on Windows if you’re thinking of doing this.
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