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anyone rocking a cassette recorder with their IBM 5150 PC?

T

tipc

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Was any commercial software released on cassette? Did IBM ever sell a cassette recorder for this specific purpose? Did they sell the cable at least? What are the a practical limits for program size using a cassette? Can you load a program (or data) using multiple cassettes as 1 won't hold enough. I sincerely think it's time this long lost technology is thoroughly explored. I'm sure we missed out, on something.

I had a coco (2?) for a short while. My friend wanted 20$ for it. I gave him 10$ up front, it took 6 months I think to give him the rest LOL. I think he even gave me the tape recorder. What a joy all that was. For sure.
 
I feel dejavu with this thread..

Only the IBM diagnostics disk was released on cassette as far as anyone knows.. A new port of space invaders was released to cassette for the 5150 in 2018 or 2019. Dont know if anyone has tried anything since.
 
Could be, but that would be news to me as well. I have never heard that and wasnt GPIB In full use at that time for that same reason?
 
VERAULT said:
s.. A new port of space invaders was released to cassette for the 5150 in 2018 or 2019. Dont know if anyone has tried anything since.
Click to expand...

Not germane to the issue, but I have an excellent copy Space Invaders done in BASIC. It replicates the original bit for bit. If there's any interest I can post it later on today.
 
There was a bit more commercial software using the cassette port than just the Diagnostic tape and some scientific software.

An early Personal Information Manager (The Organizer or Desktop Organizer) used the cassette port to hold a copy-protection dongle. The XT was released at about the same time so this version had a brief existence.

One of the Avalon Hill games (Galaxy, IIRC) could save game data to cassette. Probably an oversight since the other AH Basic games lost their cassette functionality in porting from other micros. I think some of the AH games only needed Disk Basic so those should have been able to turn into cassette versions by replacing disk calls with cassette calls.

https://github.com/retrohun/blog/tree/master/dt/bootingfromcassette is the current most active cassette development location.
 
tipc said:
The game loaded from disk but saved data to cassette?
Click to expand...

Sold on disk. Game data could be saved to and loaded from cassette. It was a prompted choice so game data could also be saved to disk. The game data was large enough that only a few generated galaxies could be stored on a 160k floppy.

If one is willing to learn Russian and spend some time adapting, there were many games and a few applications on cassette for the Soviet almost clones. The Poisk-1 had 20 games plus Basic and Pascal while the MC-1502 had a slightly larger game catalog plus BASIC, Pascal, text editor, database, and typing tutor. The Poisk is supposed to use the exact same cassette format as the IBM PC and PC Jr. I doubt these went through rigorous testing to ensure IBM PC compatibility.

http://pk-info.ru/ms1502/files/ Google Translate is adequate to explain this.
http://poisk-pc.narod.ru/poisk.htm Unfortunately, this site does not include the 60 MB complete cassette collection for Poisk. Be warned, the WAV files when uncompressed weigh in at 250 MB.
 
There was another use for cassette decks with the 5150. Didn't use the cassette port but instead required a special adapter for the parallel port to read cassettes so available to many clones as well. Only available in Europe though.

Meet Basicode.
https://www.hobbyscoop.nl/the-history-of-basicode/
https://github.com/robhagemans/basicode

Record the over the air broadcast of a program.
Read the resultant cassette.
Run a conversion program turning the Basicode program into BASIC code that would run on the machine of choice.
Run the BASIC program.
With the 5150, save the BASIC program through the cassette port. Reboot. Run the BASIC program off the cassette.

Unfortunately, it looks like the limitations Cassette BASIC precluded doing all of that without a disk drive.
 
It would appear that there was a small group of users of the cassette interface on the IBM PC. The User-to-User column in the April 1983 of PC Magazine devotes about a third of a page to a description of how to deal with the cassette interface and get the required cable. This is credited to "several readers." No idea on what the cassette interface was used for or why it took so long for PC Magazine to publish a submission on the topic.

There were some questions in the first post that were not answered. The theoretical capacity of a 30 minute side of tape would be about 270 kB. The practical limit of a cassette program is 64 kB. Cassette BASIC can't chain files and BLOAD (to get an executable into memory) is restricted to 64 kB. One could figure out how to do multiple BLOADs putting the data to make a large executable in place but anyone who knows how to do that reliably shouldn't listen to me.

One major weakness to using Cassette BASIC for anything is that only one file on cassette can be open at any time.
 
It's Halloween so how about raising this thread from the dead?

Is it better to use the line level output or mic level output on a 5150? Assuming of course the cassette recorder has both inputs and the jumper on the motherboard is set properly. I would think line level would yield a better SNR to the tape.

Is the tandy CCR-81 a good choice for a computer tape recorder?
 
I'd vote for CCR-82 as a good choice. Excellent audio quality and fairly compact. Don't know exactly how that compares to the other CCR series.
 
TRS-IAN prefers the 81. There were a couple of threads here and elsewhere that discussed the differences between models though the only ones I can locate quickly are http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?59624-Just-trolling-TRS-80-Cassette-Recorder and https://groups.google.com/forum/#!s...:date/comp.sys.tandy/NjARALfem7c/YWYk4iqWkbYJ

I think that as long as the head is clean, the belt is in good shape, and the azimuth isn't too far off, it won't matter which cassette deck you get. Exception, some early CTR-80 units had some flaw that required a modification. Evidence of this shows up as a short note in the Nov 79 Tandy newsletter. One other wrinkle is the the CTR-41 needs a dummy plug for the MIC.

I believe AUX was generally recommended for input to the tape drive.
 
I have a TRS-80 cassette cable but I haven't gotten around to trying to load a program with it.
 
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