Hackaday link to 99/4A cassette rescue

[DougM]

Persistence Pays In TI-99/4A Cassette Tape Data Recovery

In the three or four decades since storing programs on audio cassettes has been relevant, a lot of irreplaceable personal computing history has been lost to the ravages of time and the sub-optimal …

hackaday.com

just in case you missed it.

 

[Bruce Tomlin]

With my old TRS-80 tapes, I don't even try to use real hardware. (I don't have anything set up anyhow.) Quite a while ago (~15yrs?) I wrote some code to decode the data from wav files. And now I have a stereo tape player that gives awesome sound quality for rips. (much better than those CTR-xx players) All I need is more time with nothing better to do than rip dozens of tapes.

The low baud rates mean that tapes are rather robust if you can patch up a bad bit or two. The biggest problem is losing bit sync when decoding.

 

[DP69]

Thanks for sharing the link to the article. I havent tried my tapes from the 80s yet, I hope i can get the data from them.

 

[cas206]

If you run into any that won't load, consider sharing the sound file. I like the challenge of recovering the data if it's possible.