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IntellivisionGuy97

By IntellivisionGuy97
in Intellivision / Aquarius

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IntellivisionGuy97 Moonsweeper

IntellivisionGuy97

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Maybe if the price gets a little lower, you could use this for making games: eBay Auction -- Item Number: 1405767088611?ff3=2&pub=5574883395&toolid=10001&campid=5336500554&customid=&item=140576708861&mpt=[CACHEBUSTER]

 

I remember a while back it was still on at several hundred dollars, the price has dropped significantly, it would be a good item to have for a keyboard component, the winner should buy it.

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voltron River Patroller

voltron

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I swear that thing started at $750 or something like that. I'm not 100% sure what it's used for and whether it's real. He's a reputable seller that I've bought from in the past many times....

 

He is a reputable seller. And yeah it went for a lot more. but its just a blank cassete. Like was mentioned TDK Wouldwork as well as any cassete you made your mix tapes with :) I would have purchased it if it was in the original packaging and factory sealed at that price but for some reason i dont see spending 100 plus on a blank cassette. I think i will take DZ idea and just grab an old mix tape erase it and print out a new lable and slap it on :)

Edited by voltron
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cmart604 Quadrunner

+cmart604

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He is a reputable seller. And yeah it went for a lot more. but its just a blank cassete. Like was mentioned TDK Wouldwork as well as any cassete you made your mix tapes with :) I would have purchased it if it was in the original packaging and factory sealed at that price but for some reason i dont see spending 100 plus on a blank cassette. I think i will take DZ idea and just grab an old mix tape erase it and print out a new lable and slap it on :)

 

Yah, that was my gut feeling, if it came in INTV packaging it would have been gone a long time ago, I'm pretty sure I've been watching it for over a year now.

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DZ-Jay Quadrunner

+DZ-Jay

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He is a reputable seller. And yeah it went for a lot more. but its just a blank cassete. Like was mentioned TDK Wouldwork as well as any cassete you made your mix tapes with :) I would have purchased it if it was in the original packaging and factory sealed at that price but for some reason i dont see spending 100 plus on a blank cassette. I think i will take DZ idea and just grab an old mix tape erase it and print out a new lable and slap it on :)

 

I was joking, of course. :)

 

However, I recall when I was a kid that there were special "data" cassettes that claimed to be designed for computer tape units. These were more expensive, of course. I fell for it and bought a few to use with my ECS and later with my Commodore 64, while a friend of mine used just regular blank tapes for music. He didn't have any problems with them. I switched after that.

 

It's like the Floppy Disks being single- or double-sided: I'm sure there's a technical difference between them, probably making one more reliable for use than the other, but cutting a notch on my single-sided diskettes with a hole-puncher magically turned them into perfectly viable double-sided ones.

 

Even if my home-brewed double-sided diskettes or music-cum-data tapes were not as reliable or robust as The Real Thing, it really didn't matter if all I was storing on them were my crappy home-made programs. It's not as if I had any major archiving or retention requirements.

 

Now, I don't really know the requirements of the Keyboard Component, so it may as well be some special type of material coating on the tape or something; but most likely it was just a plain old blank tape.

 

-dZ.

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intvnut River Patroller

intvnut

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I was joking, of course. :)

 

However, I recall when I was a kid that there were special "data" cassettes that claimed to be designed for computer tape units. These were more expensive, of course. I fell for it and bought a few to use with my ECS and later with my Commodore 64, while a friend of mine used just regular blank tapes for music. He didn't have any problems with them. I switched after that.

 

{...}

 

Now, I don't really know the requirements of the Keyboard Component, so it may as well be some special type of material coating on the tape or something; but most likely it was just a plain old blank tape.

 

-dZ.

 

The Keyboard Component may actually require preformatted cassettes.

 

Keyboard Component tapes are the same mechanically as regular stereo cassette tapes, but the read/write head setup is different. Instead of two pairs of stereo tracks going opposite directions, the Keyboard Component treats it as 4 tracks all going the same direction. One pair of tracks is read-only, and the other pair is read-write. There's a read-only data track and a read-only analog track for sound, music and prerecorded voice. Likewise, there's a read-write data track and a read-write analog track. The read-only and read-write analog tracks are how Conversational French does its magic of, saying a phrase, sampling you saying it and playing your voice back to you.

 

The cassette unit is completely automated and block addressable. You may have noticed looking at the Keyboard Component that there are no buttons to operate the tape drive. Instead, the data sectors contain special headers that encode block boundaries and block identifiers. They're actually encoded twice at two frequencies so that the block boundaries can be identified while the tape's being fast-forwarded. (I think it can also detect them during rewind, but I'm not sure. Frank may know.)

 

The block boundaries define the pacing for all the tracks, including the audio portions. If you want to play a specific piece of audio, you specify which data block it starts at in order to seek to the right spot. The data tracks that go in parallel to audio portions are encoded specially with a unique time-code sequence that allows software to correctly synchronize with the audio regardless of whether the tape has stretched or there's variations in the tape drive motor speed. (Google around for "PicSee", which is the name David Rolfe gave to this synchronizing approach.)

 

Now here's where it gets a little fuzzy: I think all the block boundaries are all defined solely based on the read-only data track for consistency purposes. I'm pretty sure that was the case. If that is indeed true, then yes, you need special preformatted cassettes, since it's not physically possible for the Keyboard Component to format the cassette for you. From what I remember, it does not have write heads for the two read-only tracks.

 

Frank Palazzolo would likely be able to say for sure whether the KC had the ability to format a cassette. My memory is that it did not. In a sense, it's a little like "hard sectoring", only without an optical mark for the sector boundaries.

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