3 ms·

We had the equivalent tape recorder for the Atari 800 (the 410). Since Dad was an electrical engineer he drilled a hole into the top and gave us a screwdriver t

We had the equivalent tape recorder for the Atari 800 (the 410). Since Dad was an electrical engineer he drilled a hole into the top and gave us a screwdriver to adjust the azimuth to get particularly hard to load tape programs to load. The downside is that we would save our own programs on cassettes with one azimuth and then have to screw around (literally) to find the azimuth we had recorded it on in order to be able to load the program again. We seemed to have endless time and patience in those days as a kid. We would spend hours trying to load a game from a cassette, or a whole day typing in a program from a magazine only to have the computer crash before we could save it to cassette. And then start again.

failrate 3y ago
A wonderful security through obscurity way to hide a program.
squarefoot 3y ago
This bring memories of a lot younger me, coming back home with a C64 magazine and the bundled games, often original commercial ones since back then (early 80s) there was no piracy law in my country, and wasting hours trying to load them from the Datassette, no matter how the head azimuth was set. No way, those tapes were just badly recorded, so I had to try something else. I found then that I could extract from a certain pad on the cassette player pcb the signal picked up by the head after it was amplified, so I built a small driver using a couple schmitt trigger gates of a CMOS chip and used that to send a much stronger and cleaner signal to my Aiwa tape deck. After copying the data that way, I could use the copy into my Datassette which would then load all its content just fine.