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Any advice on PET cassettes not loading?

M

morykwas

Member
Joined
Oct 14, 2018
Messages
42
Location
Detroit, Michigan
I have a set of cassette tapes for my Commodore PET 2001. Many of them load and run perfectly -- but others don't. It's like the computer doesn't see them!

If I play them on a music cassette recorder, I can clearly hear the electronic sound of a saved program. Any advice?

pet-label.jpg
 
My guess would be that the degradation of the tape over time has made it such that the comparator in the datasette doesn't trigger properly to convert the audio signal to TTL, and you don't get a good data load.
My advice would be to record the tapes right away to digital audio files. I believe there are some tools to convert audio to .tap files, I don't recall the name now but will look it up. If you get it to a tap file, and can successfully load onto an emulator, then you can regenerate a clean audio signal again from the tap and re-record onto a new tape. If there are issues converting from wav to tap, some filtering of the recorded signal might help - probably boosting the overall level and filtering out the higher noise frequencies would be good. But most important would be to record it as soon as you can to capture it before it degrades further.
 
bitfixer said:
My guess would be that the degradation of the tape over time has made it such that the comparator in the datasette doesn't trigger properly to convert the audio signal to TTL, and you don't get a good data load.
My advice would be to record the tapes right away to digital audio files. I believe there are some tools to convert audio to .tap files, I don't recall the name now but will look it up. If you get it to a tap file, and can successfully load onto an emulator, then you can regenerate a clean audio signal again from the tap and re-record onto a new tape. If there are issues converting from wav to tap, some filtering of the recorded signal might help - probably boosting the overall level and filtering out the higher noise frequencies would be good. But most important would be to record it as soon as you can to capture it before it degrades further.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll give that a try and let you know how it works. I ordered one of these devices which might help with the transfer:

http://www.load64.com/1530usb
 
Interesting gadget, seems like it is more or less a usb audio interface that also converts an audio signal to logic levels for the datasette.
Should work just fine as well going from your line out/headphone from your computer to an audio cassette recorder. You sometimes need to experiment with the volume levels when doing this, very variable between audio interfaces but I've found that you need try a couple of levels to see which loads best. Too low and you read nothing, too high and seems like distortion in the signal causes read issues. Somewhere around 75% volume has worked for me in the past.
 
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