Retro Challenge 2017/04 Day 14-16

The Struggle Is REAL!


The long weekend has come and gone and I have made it to the end of the cassette tapes that I have.  After many hours of rewinding, reading, and fast forwarding, I have a total of 24 tapes with VIC programs now recovered.  Some of the tapes not included were saves from the Scott Adams games.  Other tapes had data that might have been old checkbook info or address book data.  I had some trouble, as shown above, but many of the cassettes of that day were made with screws and the ability to take apart, repair, and reassemble.  Usually, the data was still retrievable.  I have a good cassette cleaner that helped keep the CN2 happy.  I listened to some of the tapes to verify if they had any data on them.  They were very old tapes that must have been a part of a business dictation course.  In between the different saves, I could hear the course instructor dictating letters.  Interesting.

Several of the tapes had recordings of data on them but they were not VIC saves.  They may have been for our old Sinclair ZX80 but that will be for another Retro Challenge!

With all the tapes recovered, they filled almost two floppy disks!  Now to see how to take these disks and move them over to the SD2IEC.  Also I have many floppies to explore and move to SD.  There is still work ahead. I need to change the way the SD2IEC gets its 5V.  Currently it is via the cassette port.  That is not the issue really but the cabling is.  I have lots on the serial line but the SD2IEC must be close to the VIC for the connection to the port.  Maybe a Y-cable would work.

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