Back in the distant past of the 1980s, software was distributed on audio tape. Ones and zeroes were encoded as tones of different frequencies, and tapes were decoded by specialised hardware which could then spit out raw digital data to an attached computer. While software methods now exist to simply record audio from old tapes and turn them into data, [Francesco] wanted to do it the hardware way, and built a PC interface for his Commodore 64 Datasette.
The TrueTape64, as it has been named, is built around an Atmel ATTiny2313 microcontroller. This interfaces with the original Datasette hardware which takes care of reading the analog tape output and turning it into digital data. From there, the microcontroller communicates with an FTDI232 serial-to-USB adapter to get the data into a modern PC, where it’s compiled into a TAP image file via some Python magic.
It’s a barebones build, which goes so far as to run the Datasette’s motor off the USB power supply via a boost converter; those facing issues with the tape mechanism might do well to look there first. However, it does work, and a done job is a good job at the end of the day. We’ve seen similar hacks before, too – it’s great to see the community keeping cassette software alive!
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