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Cassette emulator for the IBM 5150

Ruud

Ruud

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At this moment there are two threads handling the cassette port of the IBM 5150. Having various Commodores I'm more than familiar with the cassette except.... I hardly use them because I use the Cassiopei cassette emulator.
Having a 5150 and reading those threads I got curious if there is a cassette emulator for the 5150. Using Google I found nothing but it can be that I used the wrong keywords.

Of course I gave it a thought myself. The input and output line of the Commodore cassette port are TTL level and that made it quite easy to hook it up to, for example, the LPT port of a PC. In case of the 5150 it is more obvious to the microphone inlet and the headphone outlet of a modern PC.

My main question: is there any cassette emulator around for the 5150?

Thank you in advance for any information!
 
Maybe I misunderstand, but since the 5150 uses audio input directly, you can even use an old iPod or your phone to feed data into the tape port. It's just a matter of playing the WAV file of the tape. Nothing to emulate, unlike with the Commodore stuff.
 
OK, but then what about saving files? That is something you cannot do with an iPod AFAIK.
 
The idea is good but you would need one that also can handle an external microphone. And it seems Sony has them as well. Something to think about....
 
A working remote jack would be important for true emulation. It's needed for seamless loading of machine code with a BASIC loader stub
 
Well, how many tape recorders back then had a remote port? Probably not many. It's not required, unless the PC would absolutely need to pause and resume playback of the tape on its own with no way to do it manually by the user.
 
The vast majority of them did have it. Is it "required"? No, but it makes it much easier and is how the system was intended to be used.
 
Timo W. said:
Well, how many tape recorders back then had a remote port? Probably not many.
Click to expand...

Practically every plain-jane standard "shoebox" cassette recorder:

aaef16a02fbdfb0b85703f2260622074.jpg
Had one. See how that microphone has a switch on it to start and stop the recording? Those things were immensely common. So that's why most home computer cassette systems that used generic recorders assumed they could control the deck.
 
Some of the tape emulators like the TZXDuino have support for a remote jack. Since those can play WAVs and there is IBM PC cassette to TZX conversion software, just about any of them could be repurposed for the IBM PC. Not much reason to convert to the more efficient TZX format since the complete selection of all cassette software able to run on anything resembling the IBM PC needs less than 500 MB for uncompressed WAV files. The entire cassette library of games and applications for the Soviet Poisk PC clone uses about 250 MB when stored as WAVs. There won't be any high speed turbo loading mode since no one has written high speed cassette routines for the IBM PC.
 
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