Which media do you think lasts longer, tape or disk?

[thomasholzer]

Commodore 64 had two official CD compilations to run on C64, one from Codemasters, the other from Rainbow Arts.

CD player with special adapter to cassette port (I think)

Edited March 13, 2008 by thomasholzer

[HiassofT]

This issue of Antic seems to have the schematic for the FSK decoder: does this look right? http://www.atarimagazines.com/v2n1/tapetopics.html

Yes, this looks OK. The second circuit diagram is the FSK decoder. To interface it with the line-out of a CD player you might need to adjust it a little bit, though.

 

I was just digging through my docs and found the (photo-) copy of a recorder interface, i.e. the circuit to connect a standard tape deck to your Atari. Unfortunately the quality is quite bad (circuit diagram originally printed on a grey background or so) and scanning it didn't work too well :-( The original article is from the german magazine "HC Mein Home-Computer", October 1984, pages 38-41. BTW: I haven't tried to build this interface, I collected this article more or less just out of interest.

 

EDIT: There's no reason I would need to stick to FSK data on CD, though, since the expectation is that data on CD would be much higher signal-to-noise ratio and isn't subject to any kind of degradation. Perhaps there is a much simpler circuit I could use to make 0s and 1s from 'audio' source? Something like Amplitude Shift Keying?

This all depends on what you want to do. The drawback of most turbo tape interfaces is that you need some special loader software. If you copy the original tapes to an audio CD it's slow as hell, a waste of space, but you have no compatibility issues and a 100% archive of the original.

 

Personally I wouldn't invest too much effort in re-building one of the turbo tapes or the MegaCD. These are very interesting devices from a historical point of view, but nowadays I'd recommend just using CAS files on your PC with one of the Atari peripheral emulators (eg APE, I also just added preliminary tape support to AtariSIO). Maybe we could also convince Jakub to add CAS support to his SIO2SD interface :-)

 

BTW: while looking at my docs I also found an article about the MegaCD interface in one of the ABBUC magazines. Now I'm pretty sure that it was the MegaCD interface that I was thinking about.

 

so long,

 

Hias

[atariksi]

Also helpful would be any information on what exactly the tape drive supports (pinout, special commands, etc). I've never used a 410 before. Does the 410 do the decode or is it the Atari?

All tape drives have to decode. The POKEY can transmit binary data using FSK (two-tone) encoding, which can then be recorded directly to tape without further processing, but it cannot decode it by itself.

 

The MegaCD looks very much like what I want to build. I'd be interested in rigging the Motor Control line to trigger a pause/unpause on the CD player. (MegaCD seems to be doing something else entirely with that line...) Hopefully I could devise something small enough to fit inside a small (or portable) CD player, leaving only an SIO cable hanging out. You'd then just advance to the right track on the CD and do a CLOAD, and you'd have an Atari CD-ROM drive. Switch to pick L/R stereo and pack twice as much on one CD. At 820 baud, stereo, you could fit ~930KiB on an 80-minute CDR. (820 baud is nearing the upper limit of the OS-routines, according to CAS2WAV documentation. I can always play with it later to see how high I can go...)...

 

I made a simpler simulator for the Data Cassette player which uses only the one pin from the SIO port (the Data In line) and I can do CLOAD, ENTER "C:", boot with START down, etc. I am talking about this cable here:

 

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...em=320226995941

 

I am currently doing 880 baud without any errors using normal OS routines. Using my own SIO routine, I was able to do 62798 baud before I started getting errors in the transmission (N81). I was able to avoid using the MOTOR line completely by assuming the programs to be loaded are completely loaded and run and not manipulate the MOTOR line themselves (this is true for most applications).

[elsinore98]

I have some cassette tapes from ca. 1970 that are still in great condition, but most of my tapes from the 1980s haven't survived very well. I wonder if this might be a case of "They don't make things as good as they used to..."

[TimsterAA]

Commodore 64 had two official CD compilations to run on C64, one from Codemasters, the other from Rainbow Arts.

CD player with special adapter to cassette port (I think)

 

Thomas,

 

Do you have any links to these projects? Info and/or sales? Would be curious to check these out. Did a quick check on google, but couldn't find anything definitive.

 

Thanks.

 

--Timster--

[+CharlieChaplin]

Hmm,

think my parents have some LP`s (which they got from their parents) which date back to 1908 or 1910, they are still playable (allthough they have lots of noise)... any tapes or disks from that era ?!? Well, I don`t think so... ;-) But maybe in 50-70 years someone will ask if there are still some A8 tapes or 5,25" disks left that are still good (and fully playable)...

 

-Andreas Koch.

[ijor]

Commercially mastered (factory-recorded) tape software seems to survive a lot longer than user-recorded tapes...

 

And this is, of course, true for disks as well.

 

In first place because consumer grade equipment would never write data as reliable as industrial duplicators. In the case of disks it is even worse, because a typical user made disk has been recorded several times without a full erasure (degaussing).