Old data should be backed up, and it’s becoming easier to read files created and saved on other platforms. Thanks to emulation and advances in how data is read on old formats, you can back up cartridges, cassettes and even disks, from 8-bit and 16-bit systems. Here we’re looking at C64 cassettes.
But why?
We have a ton of old computer cassettes from 1984 to 1991. On there are seven years of data from games, software and over 84 months of accumulated activity.
In some cases, the cassettes are personal fast-load backups made with the help of an Action Replay cartridge. But what we’re particularly interested in are the cassettes that hold data from art packages, tools like Graphic Adventure Creator, and other project work.
The reckoning was that if our old Commodore 64 cassette player/recorder (known as a C2N Datasette) still worked, it should be able to copy the data from the cassettes, create images of the data on our Linux system, and review what we were up to 40 years ago. After all, those cassettes might be doing well, but they’re not going to last for ever.
Most specifically, we’re interested in the contents of the tape holding The Mystery of Silver Mountain, a game published in type-in form by Usbourne (and still available in PDF form: https://bit.ly/LXF315-usbournebooks). Our recollection of this endeavour is that some errors found their way into the code, and the desire is still there to fix this so that it can finally be finished.
The process, then, is to find an adaptor, a working Datasette, and some software to convert the data (stored as audio on aCommodore 64 emulator, or a C64 Mini – if not, inverting the audio should do the trick.
