The Shop > Electronics & IC Programing

Adventures in old 80s computers.

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dawesy:
I have my C64 but the tape player doesn't work. Tried cleaning the heads and adjusting the azimuth but no joy :( have some classic games for it too.

vtsteam:
I think any old casette player will work, you just have to add a connector to suit.

Most old tape players suffer from hardening/deterioration of the rubber pinch wheel. Sometimes a cleaning or even a light sanding with very fine paper will give the rubber enough grip. Speed variation can sometimes prevent the proper data playback. Often players used a rubber ring drive belt that goes bad and can be replaced.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone hasn't worked out a way to do a fake playback sound from a modern computer's headphone jack to load programs into an old 8 bit machine that had no other means of transfer. Though a homemade serial null modem might be another way of loading files if the comp was capable of using a modem.

Maybe you could also make a cart. I used to program eproms through a homemade parallel port eprom programmer, and erased them with a sunlamp.

DavidA:
 These two links may come in useful for anyone who finds their Dallas Clock battery is dead.  It could keep a few old machines running,  and it is madmodding at it's finest.

http://www.mcamafia.de/mcapage0/dsrework.htm

http://classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2009-10-10-renovating-a-dallas-battery-chip.htm

Dave.

awemawson:
Now these 'old' computers you are talking about are really quite modern !

When I first started using computers in the late 1960's they were pretty enormous, big cabinets with separate bays for the CPU and memory etc. We has serial CPU's and parallel ones, the former being the economy version as it cut down of the number of circuits required. Main memory was 'Core Store' - tiny ferrite rings threaded onto an X, a Y a 'Sense wire' and an 'Inhibit wire'. Backing storage was Drum memory and later rigid 'head per track' disc memory.

I well remember one night having to replace the 'disk enclosure' at a Mobil oil refinery - 2 megabytes of memory, but the system only took in high level language and compiled it at load time (Fortran in this case). I worked out that that night we had loaded 14.1 MILES of paper tape to reconstruct the 2 Mbyte disk image  :ddb:

S. Heslop:
I saw a thing a while ago where someone was programming for one of those gigantic 60s computers on punch tape. The punching machine was extremely noisy, sounded like a vacuum cleaner, and there was no facility to erase mistakes of course. Really makes me appreciate this modern era! When I was programming in Microsoft's visual studio it even had something like a spell check that told me if i'd made any typos, and an auto-complete to help me remember variable names. Although I've heard some more serious programmers complain that that kind of stuff stops you from actually 'thinking' about the code and how it works.

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