Sold my 810's and kept a 1010 ? (What?)

[ACML]

I just sold my two nice minty 810's and of all things I've decided to keep was a 1010 recorder I bought at a retro-gaming shop because I wanted the SIO cable. Sounds crazy, but it makes sense to me. I have two SDRIVEs, one is a NUXX and the other is an SDRIVE Micro. Maintaining floppies, hauling a 8 lb 810 with its bulk just does not compute anymore. For grins, I fired up the 1010 and after 30+ years, its still worked. Oh, but the memories of my first Atari 400 and my 410 recorder. What really struck me was that familiar feeling hearing that 8 second lead in tone and the too familiar 600 baud garble. Brought me way back to the beginning (Christmas 1981). My SDRIVEs are the way to go, but for nostalgia, its hard to top a cassette. I managed to use a cassette for the first 1.5 years until I could afford an 810.

[Marius]

I feel almost the same ... I love tape ... I also miss the sound of my modem calling out in the middle of the night.

 

But... I also love to use real floppies. It's not the same as those modern solutions which I use a lot also btw.

 

When you have space enough... I'd keep it all.

 

There is one rule in my house: whatever item carrying an Atari logo comes in, NEVER leaves

[+wood_jl]

I find myself quite pleased with the reliability of (1) COMMERCIAL tapes and (2) the 1010. I know both the 1010 and the commerical tapes are both old now, and this longevity of reliability bodes well for them. But back in "the day," I was quite miffed with the UNRELIABILITY of the 410 and PERSONAL tapes. I used to save typed-in BASIC programs 3 to 5 times, as the crap was THAT unreliable!

 

I don't know if it was the 410 or just home recordings, but when I load "States and Capitals" or "Conversational French" (all originals) from a 1010 and it works every time, that's more impressive than almost anything. The SIO2SD/Sdrive stuff will never let you down, but it's new tech.

[Magic Knight]

Around 80% of my collection is tapes. As Europe was more tape than disk orientated back in the 80's (costs and availability - especially with affordable £2($3) Mastertronic/codemasters tapes ); this was a medium which is no less a important part of my collection than disk.

 

The 1010 (japan and Hong Kong models) is still the more robust when compaired to the 410 or the XE at full strength, and although i like my 1050 and 810 drives, the tape deck loading away brings fond memories!

 

If i had to leave all but one loading peripheral - it would have to be the 1010 tape deck that remains.

[Marius]

A few years ago I recorderd all my commercial games to WAV, and then converted them to .CAS files.

But that was not all!

 

No! I converted them then back to WAV, so the WAV was free of noise or glitches. Then I recorded it back with professional recording equipment, on tapes of extremely high quality (not audio quality, but tape quality). I shortened the tape length, so that the data recorder would not have to work so hard.

 

Extremely reliable tapes, and a joy to load.

[Fres]

There's no way to emulate tapes like Conversational French, Spanich, etc. (the ones that have recorded audio), right? I know some of the emulators support .cas files, but those don't include the audio. Is that correct?