Ahh that takes me back. For the kids, here's how you use those things:
You slide back the metal shield to expose the surface of the disc. Carefully, you engage the read head or "needle" as we used to call it - a joke riffing on those archaic record player things that mum and dad danced to. We would of course be listening to our modern cassettes in our dodgy knock off Walkmans and rubbish headphones.
You will notice that there are two small square cut outs on each disc. That means that grumpygamer had access to the latest double sided discs. When you got to the end of side A, you turned it over and engaged side B to continue loading.
That thing is known as a floppy disc, which was pretty rubbish marketing, given that the 5 1/4" effort was actually ... floppy. I don't miss them at all but I still have a few around the place.
Another older example: Out Run game for ZX Spectrum. You would load it from the A side of the tape and, when finished, you could play the game soundtrack on the B side while gaming. Double win: you get awesome music and you wouldn't need to rewind the tape!
Remember the little holes at the bottom that were there to make a cassette "read only"? You could get around it by covering the holes with scotch tape or plugging them with bits of paper.
When I was younger we had an Amstrad (CPC6128) that had a disk drive, but not a tape drive. My cousins had travelled to the UK where they picked up lots of games, but unfortunately most were on cassette. Being desperate to enjoy the wonderful new worlds contained within, I had to come up with a solution. In my case, I cracked open my sisters ghetto blaster and wired it in to the port on the side of the Machine. Worked like a charm, and I too got to enjoy the gruelling wait on every game change.
Wow these designs bring back some memories. As a kid I probably had several hundred cassettes, some pre-recorded, but mostly recorded from the radio or copies (remember high-speed dubbing?). I used to ask for cassettes whenever we'd end up at the store (well, until I got my first computer, then it was disks). I guess I was a bit of a weird kid.
Ways of 'downloading' in my childhood, in decreasing order of unreliability:
* Via the television, holding a cassette recorder microphone to the tele speaker, after staying up till after midnight to catch it.
* Buying a magazine with a bendy plastic 45 record stuck to the cover and playing it on a record player, again probably using the microphone because you didn't have the right leads.
* From the radio. Woohoo, straight to the integrated cassette recorder. Although even then I don't think I ever got even that to work. Mind you it was pretty hit and miss loading an 'original' tape on the ZX Spectrum.
* Typing it in from a magazine. It took an afternoon, but at least you got to correct your mistakes. Unless it was a particularly crashy mistake.
And, wow, out out nowhere I've suddenly recalled having one of my own, a wordsearch solver, published in one of them. My first upload! Those were the days, I'm welling up!
I get the cassette thing because that was an audio format people used for albums, but in the 90s nobody released albums on floppy discs, so this is like all gimmick
I grew up in the era of cassettes. I’d tape songs of the radio as a kid. In high school and college I would tape my records and the new “cds” so my music would be portable (Walkman and parents car).
My brothers and I bought a really good Yamaha three head cassette player. We did some a/b testing with cds and with Dolby c it was really hard to tell the difference.
Though with Walkman you’d have to clean the rubber rollers when they got a little gummed up and there was always the danger of the tape failing and getting pulled out.
I remembered those insane 120 minute cassettes full of ZX Spectrum games, of which the magnetic tape was extremely thin and completely hazardous in the long run.
Back in the day, there were magazines that had a flexible plastic LP/single (aka 'vinyl'), that you'd play on your stereo, and record to cassette, and load into the computer.
I used cassettes a lot a while back. I took my cds and made tapes of them for my car and Walkman. Had a pretty good tape deck for my home stereo (Yamaha 3 head..)
Cassettes are terrible. You have to clean the pinch rollers a lot or you can get a weird “wah” sound as the speed changes slightly as the tape is being pulled through.
And the hiss, even with Dolby b noise removal it was kinda not great. Dolby c and Dbx where so much better but without having it on walkmen/car players the point was lost.
OccTionally you’d get a jam and the tape would pull out of the shell. you’d have to try and get the tape back inside without a twist..see the first photo in the article
It was an interesting format (write protect tabs on the top, that would prevent you from recording over accidentally. There were also differ holes in the top of the tape which indicated which “type” of tape it was (cro2, metal or normal)
This bring memories of a lot younger me, coming back home with a C64 magazine and the bundled games, often original commercial ones since back then (early 80s) there was no piracy law in my country, and wasting hours trying to load them from the Datassette, no matter how the head azimuth was set. No way, those tapes were just badly recorded, so I had to try something else. I found then that I could extract from a certain pad on the cassette player pcb the signal picked up by the head after it was amplified, so I built a small driver using a couple schmitt trigger gates of a CMOS chip and used that to send a much stronger and cleaner signal to my Aiwa tape deck. After copying the data that way, I could use the copy into my Datassette which would then load all its content just fine.
And millennials wonder why people make fun of them. Cassettes were, and still are, terrible.
They made sense since it was possible to copy from another format, such as vinyl/radio/CD even another cassette. It was the only format you were able to copy to (technically you could with 8-tracks, but you could not easily get blanks). Nowadays, if you really wanted a copy, straight to digital.
You did get adept at looking at a record to figure out where the songs were based on the record track "texture". (our high school had a radio station, and records being the music mode at the time). To cue up the next song, we'd play the record into the song, take the payer "out of gear" and manually spin the record backwards while listening till we hit blank. We did this part off the air (most of the time..)
We had this wierd cassette player boombox. It had 2 ff and rewinds, one of which would disable the pinch rollers, pull the tape head back a bit and fast forward the tape listening for blank areas, where upon it would stop. It worked but I'm guessing the wear and tear on the tapes must have been bad. Though we didn't notice.
I remember putting together a mag-stripe reader with old tape heads based on schematics/code in Phrack (or maybe 2600...been awhile). At the time, tape decks were found in almost every home, while (to me) a mag-stripe reader was exoctic. Seems we've come full circle. Actually IIRC the older Square reader (which seems to be the one in the video) is literally a tape head wired to a 1/8 jack aligned to read track 2.
You slide back the metal shield to expose the surface of the disc. Carefully, you engage the read head or "needle" as we used to call it - a joke riffing on those archaic record player things that mum and dad danced to. We would of course be listening to our modern cassettes in our dodgy knock off Walkmans and rubbish headphones.
You will notice that there are two small square cut outs on each disc. That means that grumpygamer had access to the latest double sided discs. When you got to the end of side A, you turned it over and engaged side B to continue loading.
That thing is known as a floppy disc, which was pretty rubbish marketing, given that the 5 1/4" effort was actually ... floppy. I don't miss them at all but I still have a few around the place.
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