Ordinary cassette interface for VIC20?

[Victragic]

Hi,

is there an interface that allows one to use an ordinary cassette player with a VIC?

I just thought it would be neat to put all my tapes onto an MP3 player and have a mass storage device of sorts for my VIC...

Cheers
-Glen

[davidv_]

The problem is the mp3 compression (psychoacoustic - humans dont make a diff why should we keep this) would most definately screw up the peaks and phases of the audio on of the vic tapes, rendering them useless.

Heck i cant even use voxengo's Linear phase and non lossy EQ VSTs to clean tapes.

[6502dude]

What you need is one of these:

http://digilander.libero.it/tcengineer/ ... index.html

(orginally posted by Schema in thread - http://sleepingelephant.com/v-web/bulle ... highlight= )

[Victragic]

DC2N looks good, but I might as well use my soldering iron to roast marshmallows, such is my skill level.. I wouldn't be able to burn the firmware either..

Also, I would use wav files with my mp3 player, so compression shouldn't be a problem..

I have a vague recollection that such interfaces may have existed back in the day, can anyone confirm this...?

[CurtisP]

The problem is the mp3 compression (psychoacoustic - humans dont make a diff why should we keep this) would most definately screw up the peaks and phases of the audio on of the vic tapes, rendering them useless.

I would have thought this to be the case, but I am able to use MP3's to load games into the Starpath Supercharger on my Atari 2600 with no problems.

[davidv_]

I would have thought this to be the case, but I am able to use MP3's to load games into the Starpath Supercharger on my Atari 2600 with no problems.

I dont know about the waveform encoding of that Starpath, probably totally different . But idd be surprised if mp3's would work with commodore kernal (rom) loaders (depends on bit rate and encoder of course YMMV)

For the past three evenings, Ive been hacking away at the tape64 source code to "massage" bad waveforms and to add intelligence to it to salvage the
bits. Only a slight sample edit to the waveform, change in reading speed, or amplitude can make a load error or bad parity in tape64.

This is an interesting read:
http://tapes.c64.no/conv.php

"Another pretty common way to transfer tapes, is through sampling it with a soundcard using a HiFi-tapedeck. DON'T DO IT!!!! It's a TERRIBLE way of dumping tapes, and the error-rate is VERY high. It's quite high even using a real datasette."

Why am i bothering then? .. Im an Audio DSP progammer, and this is another fun challenge... and its totally geeky. AND i have old programs i made, in fact my first game, which i cant even read on a real vic (load error), that has nasty drop outs, but looking at the waveform in a wav editor, im sure it can be fixed by more intelligent decoding.

This post is great:
http://tapes.c64.no/forum/viewtopic.php?t=199

Speaking of which are there other loaders that have been used for the VIC? Is the mastertronic vic tapes using the same loader as the 64 one?

[yoyodyne]

Cardco made a cassette interface. I have one around here somewhere,
but I never tested it. I like the idea, my sony mini-disc can
record audio, I might have to give that a try.

Brian

[davidv_]

Cardco made a cassette interface. I have one around here somewhere,
but I never tested it. I like the idea, my sony mini-disc can
record audio, I might have to give that a try.

Brian

Yes, please report how Sony ATRAC does better than mp3

[carlsson]

Yes, once I came across instructions how to build your own interface. I tried, but failed terribly.

[eslapion]

Another pretty common way to transfer tapes, is through sampling it with a soundcard using a HiFi-tapedeck. DON'T DO IT!!!! It's a TERRIBLE way of dumping tapes, and the error-rate is VERY high. It's quite high even using a real datasette.

HA He hum... I transfered a good number of programs from datasette formatted tapes to PC using my good old Technics tape deck and I have yet to have a single failure.

Among others, I transfered Motor Mouse and Practicalc using this method and both transfered great.

[eslapion]

Cardco made a cassette interface. I have one around here somewhere,
but I never tested it. I like the idea, my sony mini-disc can
record audio, I might have to give that a try.

Brian

As Davidv_ pointed out, Sony's mini-disc system uses the A-Trac compression algorythm which is also a psychoacoustic system, just like MP3 but less complex.

I strongly suspect you might run into similar problems, for similar reasons.

[ssjlance]

Hey Carlsson, do you have any idea where those directions would be? I doubt I could do it due to my lack of soldering skill, however it'd be nice to know (I have friends who can solder:twisted: ).

[carlsson]

I could look, but I think it was described in a book of electronic projects that I don't own. Otherwise, you have the soundcard2tape interface by Tomaz Kac which practically should do the same thing.

Anyway, plain old C2N tape recorders still are a plenty, and should be cheap to get a few spares. Save your modding and soldering skills for a DC2N or something otherwise cool.