Cassettes - better than you don't remember

[w1k]

[Marius]

I absolutely loved this video. Great stuff!

I'm a huge fan of vinyl, and on a8 I like to use tape.

 

I'm going to dig up my Technics tapedeck, and I'm wondering if it has the Dolby S system. It was a professional deck but I haven't used it in a few years.

 

Thanks for sharing!

Greetz

Marius

[sack-c0s]

That whole channel is really destructive for my productivity - it just draws me in and an hour can go easily.

[Mclaneinc]

Not wishing to be a grump but lets remember that playing music tapes and remembering old times is far apart from the use of tapes as a data storage and retrieval unit...

 

Lets not forget how happy 99% of us were to get a disk drive...

 

Waiting for a non turbo enabled tape loading system was as fun as a dropping 10 quid and finding a penny...

 

Tapes were an option I was glad to see the back of, the fact they are emulated is nice but I'd rather have been using my TDK SA90's to play my favourite disco and funk on than waiting 15 mins for a program to load...

Edited May 16, 2016 by Mclaneinc

[576XE]

I saw one strange thing.

 

In video he shows filtering abilities of Dolby, in tape-noise (static) environment but Dolby in it's best i.e. in real soundful environment shows much more impressive results because of dynamic nature of Dolby.

[oracle_jedi]

Tapes were an option I was glad to see the back of, the fact they are emulated is nice but I'd rather have been using my TDK SA90's to play my favourite disco and funk on than waiting 15 mins for a program to load...

 

My memory is Dropzone taking something like 40 minutes to load off tape. Maybe I am remembering that wrong, but I was not sorry to see computer data tapes go.

 

The audio track playing while "European Countries and Capitals" loaded was a cool feature, but not enough to overcome the tedium of long load times, or the morale crushing "BOOT ERROR" appearing after waiting thirty or so minutes for a game to load.

[Rybags]

I didn't miss them either, it was a relief to mothball the 1010 after getting a 1050 and transferring anything worth having to floppy.

 

Load times, really they weren't as bad as some make out. Worst case normally might be about 18 minutes for something 44K to load which realistically is about as big as you'd get for a 48K machine.

I remember having a loan of BBSB and trying to copy it and get onto disk, can't remember the load time though but entirely possible it could have been the longest loading tape game.

[Marius]

I love using tape on a8. I always loved it. It's probably a nostalgia thing, but still.... the idea that such a basic storage device does even exist.

 

And... seriously... one or two times I can remember the existing of tape really saved me a lot of work. I once fired up my Synassembler cart, but I was not aware that no harddisk or diskdrive booted a dos. So I started coding... it was a lot of work what I wrote in the assembler, and then I wanted to save to disk. Error #130... what the?

 

Not even a freezer connected. Nothing.

 

Then I grabbed my trusty XC12 and a blank tape and I saved all my work to cassette. That works always. To be safe, I saved it twice.

 

Never been happier with my tape unit

[baktra]

In this age of disk drives/disk drive replacements, I am wondering what types/brands of new blank cassettes are available in US?

In Europe, it is a simple choice - Maxell UR-90.

What do you use in US? AUDIO PRO from NAC or something else?

[Bryan]

I like having a 1010 in my system. I'm not as crazy about using it, though I enjoy occasionally hearing the sound. Maybe I should make Atari loading noises my ringtone.

 

For audio, cassettes could be decent but you needed to drop some cash on good equipment and tapes. They were originally designed for dictation and had a lot of hurdles to overcome.

[eegad]

Not much nostalgia for me for cassette data tapes. Okay, back in 1981 when I got my first computer (400 and 410, because I couldn't afford a disk drive), they served their purpose, and I filled up many many tapes, and bought several. But even back then I was like "oh come ON already!" when I waited for 10 minutes for Frogger to load from tape (and sometimes it would crap out 75% of the way through!), when just plugging in a PacMan cart was instant. Just recently cleaned out the attic and tossed some old Atari stuff that I'd never use again, including the 410 and all the tape software...as well as the XM-301 modem and some other useless stuff. I was SO glad to finally get a 1050 in '84-ish! Never missed the tapes. ....although I will admit that the SOUND of a loading Atari tape might still bring a smile to my face.

[Mclaneinc]

To relive the tape loader noise just load a cas file with Altirra...Much easier to set up and you can hit patch CIO for a faster load

[Mclaneinc]

Just to confirm, I'm not down on tapes, I had a 410 and a 1010 (1010 free with job) and started out like most with a tape and having had a ZX80 and 81 I was well used to tape load with the Atari being a lot more reliable BUT, once you saw / heard an 810 doing its stuff the notion of tapes just felt wrong. Unlike the Eastern Europe we didn't have turbo cassette loaders mechs because the disk drives while expensive were much cheaper than getting them in Eastern Europe so we sort of hurdled the turbo mechanisms in the UK and US.

 

Had I have had one I may have felt different but listening to my Happy clone load up ultraspeed stuff was just music to my ears, I also went the same route on the C64 which although it had Tape turbo loaders with no need for hardware I still got myself Dolphin DOS (a parallel disk drive board) which copied unprotected disks in 15 secs on them (hence the program called 15 second copy) and loaded much faster on most disks.

 

Tapes are part of the history of computing but I don't really miss them at all..

Edited May 16, 2016 by Mclaneinc

[+save2600]

I just like the title of this thread because when it comes to audio, tapes *are* better than most remember them! Played back on good decks (Revox, Nakamichi, Kyocera, Tandberg, A/D/S, etc.), they can sound great! Much better than most non-remastered/early CD's and especially better than todays crappy and compressed file formats. Just wish Maxell (and others) still made a quality cassette, like the Epitaxial, XLII-S and MX-S.

[walter_J64bit]

I've started with a tape 1010 drive, at the time I'd live in the UK.

[ijor]

Load times, really they weren't as bad as some make out. Worst case normally might be about 18 minutes for something 44K to load which realistically is about as big as you'd get for a 48K machine.

 

That's what you would think. But I'm sorry to disappoint you. Some titles loaded "load screens" exactly as the disk version. Which was ridiculous. Furthermore, some games load multiple times and levels.

 

One such case I remember was Kennedy Approach. First it loaded the high rez screen ... then it cleared the screen and loaded the option menu ... only then it loaded the game with the corresponding airport you selected. And you had to reload the last two parts (as they load on the disk version) each time you finish one level !

 

IIRC it came in two tapes (some other titles were recorded on both sides). You had to be brave to play this game from tape, knowing that you might need to restart from the very beginning if, as happened rather frequently, any block fails !

[Keatah]

Some of those early CD's were absolutely horrible! I have several..unfortunately..

[Dmitry]

Not wishing to be a grump but lets remember that playing music tapes and remembering old times is far apart from the use of tapes as a data storage and retrieval unit...

 

Lets not forget how happy 99% of us were to get a disk drive...

 

Waiting for a non turbo enabled tape loading system was as fun as a dropping 10 quid and finding a penny...

 

Tapes were an option I was glad to see the back of, the fact they are emulated is nice but I'd rather have been using my TDK SA90's to play my favourite disco and funk on than waiting 15 mins for a program to load...

 

 

 

I spent considerable amount of time with no storage at all. So I was happy, AT FIRST, to get a tape drive.

 

I should back up...I happened to start on an Atari 400 with nothing else, just the machine. Not even basic.

 

It literally did nothing - I could type on the screen, that was it. Eventually I did get a basic cartridge, and at that point I was able to type in basic games - over a period of hours and eventually play one.

 

Which you'd have for a while, until a power outage or until you wanted to try typing in the next game.

 

The tape drive was at first a small miracle...but it so quickly was tiresome....I have to say, I eventually got that 1050 disk drive, and I loved it. I though it was truly speedy.

 

They tell me now that it was slow compared to say, an Apple II - I didn't know it then. My friends on their commodores had terrible floppy drives, truly awful performance.

[Bryan]

They tell me now that it was slow compared to say, an Apple II - I didn't know it then. My friends on their commodores had terrible floppy drives, truly awful performance.

 

Apple had really fast IO because Woz liked doing everything on the host CPU to reduce the parts count (remember that the original Apple I & II were built without any custom silicon). This meant you couldn't really do anything else during loading, but there was no secondary transfer bottleneck (like SIO) to worry about.

[Mclaneinc]

@Dmity, Oh yeah, remember being in the Atari 400, no BASIC, no tape and only a few carts, price prohibited a lot of things then so at the time a tape deck seemed like you had won the lottery, between that and BASIC you could finally do something on your own AND save it. I was lucky as some know, I started selling the Atari very very early on in its life and was lucky that I got things on loan and at trade so I was a little spoilt but when the 810's hit the shop it was like a miracle had happened

 

As for the C64 tape vs standard 1541 disk drive, yes, some felt the tapes were pretty close to the drive speed and when you got a Novaload going on the tape the expected increase in disk speed felt underwhelming but it was the disk drives accessibility that made it so important, tapes were sequential and it was easy to accidentally over write a previously saved item where a disk drive was just pop the disk in and if you had the space on the floppy no problem and loading didn't need setting the disk drive to a particular spot, you just put the name in and the drive did all the seeking. Thankfully we also got drive fast loaders quite quickly so the tape vs disk drive load speed improved hugely with disk drives even under software speed up loading much much faster.

 

And a little digress, as a kid we had a Saturday market in Dalston in the East End of London, it was called the Waste for some reason and stretched along a long length of the main route through the area, I spent my Saturdays wandering up and down looking at the stalls hoping to find cheap cassette tape blanks as I recorded TV programs direct from the speaker (c'mon, I was young) and like to play with over dubbing sounds on a tape using a slip of paper, the BBC also had an Electronic workshops special sound effects LP with sounds direct from Dr Who (space craft landing etc) and I made up crazy little special effects tapes.

 

The point being that I loved cassette tapes and they were a big part of my young life, they just sucked big time as a method of computer storage, useful at first but as said, incredibly tiresome very quickly.

 

Did you really enjoy sitting with your own tapes zeroing the tape counter and having to write down the start and stop point for every program on the tape so you could fast forward to a game you liked?

 

Thought not

Edited May 17, 2016 by Mclaneinc

[sack-c0s]

I saw one strange thing.

 

In video he shows filtering abilities of Dolby, in tape-noise (static) environment but Dolby in it's best i.e. in real soundful environment shows much more impressive results because of dynamic nature of Dolby.

 

He also explains that if he were to demonstrate any actual music the Youtube copyright patrol would be on his back in a heartbeat.

That said - I'd have thought a short section for those purposes would be considered fair use

[Marius]

Talking about Apple ][

 

I have this fabulous Apple //c here and there is a program on it, that is called Locksmith FastCopy.

 

You have no idea HOW FAST that is. Duplicating a disk is a matter of a few seconds on that program (serious!)

[Mclaneinc]

Oh arr Jim Lad, fast copies eh

 

Seriously, never had an Apple, wanted one because they looked dead sexy,,,Some nice stuff on it and some great ports to the Atari..

[SoundGammon]

I just like the title of this thread because when it comes to audio, tapes *are* better than most remember them! Played back on good decks (Revox, Nakamichi, Kyocera, Tandberg, A/D/S, etc.), they can sound great! Much better than most non-remastered/early CD's and especially better than todays crappy and compressed file formats. Just wish Maxell (and others) still made a quality cassette, like the Epitaxial, XLII-S and MX-S.

I have a Marantz SD-72 three-head machine that has better specs than cds using metal tapes. Along with DBX, I can make tapes wirh better dynamic range and quality than you can ever get from a cd! I buy thrift store pre-recorded tapes and remaster them! Fun hobby for me for sure! Friends come over and say: "That's a cassette???".

[+Stephen]

Talking about Apple ][

 

I have this fabulous Apple //c here and there is a program on it, that is called Locksmith FastCopy.

 

You have no idea HOW FAST that is. Duplicating a disk is a matter of a few seconds on that program (serious!)

The Mega Speedy mod can do this. It reads the entire disk in a few seconds then writes copies out just as fast, using it's built in RAM.