{"id":82,"date":"2011-08-19T16:29:24","date_gmt":"2011-08-19T16:29:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greg-kennedy.com\/?p=82"},"modified":"2011-08-19T16:34:12","modified_gmt":"2011-08-19T16:34:12","slug":"dumping-c64-tapes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greg-kennedy.com\/wordpress\/2011\/08\/19\/dumping-c64-tapes\/","title":{"rendered":"Dumping C64 Tapes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Cleaning out the garage to set up my photo studio and I ran across boxes of Commodore 64 gear given to me by a friend for my birthday a couple years ago.\u00a0 Among the items: some crusty old cassette tapes with data on them.\u00a0 Back in the day, disk drives were expensive luxury items for saving your data (and the disks were costly too).\u00a0 The cheaper alternative: a “datasette”<\/a> – a specialized tape recorder that can save and load to standard and widely available audio tapes.\u00a0 There were some quirks to working with tapes: they are extremely slow, must be manually positioned at the right point, and like all magnetic media the tapes “should be” carefully stored.<\/p>\n

Fortunately retrocomputing hobbyists have since worked out long-term digital storage solutions for the analog data on the tape of various 8-bit computers.\u00a0 On Commodore machines this is the TAP file – a digital representation of the various pulse lengths detected on a tape.\u00a0 It can be replayed in an emulator, or turned back into a pristine WAV file to be used in a real machine (record it back to a new tape, etc).<\/p>\n

Now, the ‘preferred’ way to dump a tape is to use a special cable to link the C64 to your PC, but I only have three tapes here and there’s no way I would go to the effort of that.\u00a0 Instead I settled on the super cheap method: hook a standard tape deck to the line in of the computer sound card, record the WAV, then use a tool to make a TAP file out of it.\u00a0 Not a very good solution for people with a lot of tapes to dump, because the resulting file needs a lot of manual cleaning to work properly afterwards.\u00a0 The tool suite I used to fix it all up were:<\/p>\n