@@NoelsRetroLab I was about to say I'd love to see more regarding how fast you can load audio - then I got to the bit of the video where you said you'll be making a video about it. The video about how fast you can load from a cassette is the video that made me subscribe.
The Shift/RunStop key function on the C64 is inherited from the even older 1977 Commodore PET, which as you probably know was designed with tape in mind. The function is built into the screen editor which as far as I can see was copied wholesale into the VIC 20 and C64. Also, for some reason a lot of people in the UK (one of Commodores biggest markets outside the USA) also used tapes for the C64 (in the early 80s few people could afford disk drives, (possibly because of unfavorable exchange rates?) so most games were sold as cassette. It really wasn't until the late 80s that disk drives became cheap enough for the "average" game player to afford.
Yeah, price was a problem in the UK. IIRC the 1541 cost about as much as the 64 itself, so hurt its selling point of being relatively inexpensive and competitive with the other 8-bit micros. I suspect the culture surrounding the UK home computer boom was a bit different to the US computer scene too, which might have had an impact on the cost that each market was prepared to accept. I think cost was a problem even later in the C64's life, because the cost of a C64+1541 was uncomfortably close to that of an Amiga or Atari ST.
@@Silanda Yes, the first time I noticed a floppy drive being "cheap" was around '85/86 when Dixons were selling the Atari 800XL & 1050 floppy drive cheap in an attempt to sell off the XL stock with the arrival of the new redesigned XE machines. At the time I wasn't so into the C64 so I didn't notice the prices but I do recall complaints in the computer magazines about how expensive they were compared to the other computers.
Partly unfavourable exchange rates. Partly a tradition among computer sellers and manufacturers to not apply any exchange rate at all! So if something cost $499, it would be priced in the UK at £499, at a time when £1 was worth about $2 ! This continued into the 1990s with all sorts of gear including PCs and their parts. I think it's the Internet that finally got them to cut it out, giving people a choice of importing themselves, or at least seeing American prices and realising how much they were being ripped off! Now we can order stuff for peanuts directly from China, and the only issue is things being dangerous and shoddily made.
Brilliant video. Love the detail in the range of computers used (I have an Enterprise, a original Z80, various Acorns, Commodores and Spectrum machines and Amstrad too, so I can use them for that tape experience); the oscilloscope work, and how you worked with the maker to fix the Oric issue.
@@NoelsRetroLab Thanks: I'm just emailing the seller citing your review and asking if he ships to the UK (with C64 and other cables). I hope he supports the Enterprise soon. p.s. (Oh and have PC Engines, Atari Lynx mk1, PHILIPS G7000 Videopac and other Sega and Nintendo stuff, but had mods for those. Got matching monitors too, except for the Sinclair line)
FYI...we had the official tape deck for C64...disk drives where too expensive..alot of the shops also sold cassettes for the C64 nice vid...thanks Noel
Same where I lived back then. *Every* C64 user I knew had the "datasette" until the disk drives came down in price. Drives were extremely expensive back then, pretty much as expensive or even more than a C64. I don't know if it really was more expensive to make but wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. But when the user got a disk drive there was no looking back - even though the C64/1541 combo suffered from that infamous firmware bug that made the drive slower than it needed to be. When floppy speeders entered the scene, tapes were laughed at. Yes, there were tape speeders, too, but who wanted a tape when you have a floppy with a directory, sequential access, still faster loading and usually much more reliable (if we forget the overheating problem for a moment...).
Same here, we had around 100 tapes !!!!. The 1531, when properly alligned and mantained, barely failled. Tapes were better than people think. A bit slow ... but hey ... the 80s magic.
Where are you based, though? Although Noel doesn't actually mention that, I for some reason automatically assumed he was talking about users in the US (maybe because Commodore was American?). I do know over here in Europe cassettes were probably the most common media for C64 games.
@@BilisNegra australia here... by the time i had C64s at home, disc drives where all the thing, but we where stuck with tape (even tho step brother actually worked for commodore australia!)...my cousin had a C64 with disc drive from early on and thats where i learnt to add *",8,1 ...tapes where just the cheaper medium i guess and i was used to them from CPC days
Here in the UK nearly all computer users used tape, even the C64 which wasn't as popular as in the US most people still used tape. Mainly because the drives were so damn expensive over here and besides tapes were so cheap and easy to copy 🏴☠️.
Same in Spain, first computer I saw with a DD was the Amiga 500. My first floppy disk experience was with my 286 computer, and I loved it, when your parents are limiting the time you have to play with the computer, the tape really sucks, and many times you cant even load the game :( AZIMUT NIGHTMARES
In Canada, every computer of the era was automatically equipped with a disk drive. Mostly Made in Taiwan knockoffs, cheap, common, and surprisingly good. You just couldn't buy or sell software on tapes, there was no market for them.
Even tho I will never ever need a device like this, it is hard not to applaud the creators of this perfect blend of retro and modern tech that serves a need that is so niche.
This SVI-CAS seems like an excellent product. Considering the tremendous amount of work involved in such a project, $85 AU is an excellent value. I was expecting $200 or more. Another excellent video Noel.
I'm glad you reviewed this. I was able to order mine recently (along with all the cables). I look forward to receiving it. I noticed as you removed each computer from your shelves that you seemed to have reasonably similar boxes. I wondered where you got them. I have several computers without boxes that I would like to protect better (they are only wrapped in anti-static bags).
Excellent. I'm sure you'll enjoy it. I got my boxes from a small box company with lots of different sizes, so I got the ones to match the computers exactly. I really like this set up. www.embalen.com/shop/ver/cajas-de-carton-automontables/cajas-de-carton-de-tapa-y-fondo
Yes, try this device with a ZX81/TS1000. A full -featured video on this computer would be nice as well. This computer was responsible for many of us learning Z80 assembly due to it's limited abilities. Then things like hi-res graphics and an extended BASIC instruction set, etc. became possible. It forced those of us on an extremely limited budget to either give up or press on to vastly exceed the limits of what Sinclair ever thought the machine was capable of. I chose the latter.
Looks great, I want one! A couple of UX things I think would improve it a little as well: 1. Left and right arrow keys either side of the computer selection box, so you can go backwards as well as forwards through the list 2. With the On-Screen Keyboard, make the keys larger by only showing upper OR lower case at the same time, rather than both, and switch between them with a Shift Key option 3. Show a message giving the tape load command to enter at the computer prior to commencing loading, so you don't need to refer to the manual
C64 tape decks were huge in England and Australia. The commando loader (with music playing) is from the original release. However, not corrupted like that :\
The ability to record alone makes this worthwhile. It's not a feature nessecary for EVERY game, but if you have any interest in text adventures, many would require you to save between parts and carry objects between one part and another, something that can't really be done with a TZXduino.
The Commodore C64 and Vic20 were really lightly evolved versions of the Commodore PET, which were aimed at business and schools. The Pets definitely didn't have cartridges. Early units shipped with cassette built in. I think there was an idea that it doubled as an IO device as well as tape playback for typists doing transcriptions. In school, we had a computer lab that had several pets. They all shared one floppy drive, but some units had external tape drives that were not shared.
OK... Another retro related gadget that I need to spend money on... :) I will use this on Spectrums and C64, so I would appreciate a follow video up on the recording capability on these machines too. The fact that the code is written from scratch and not being a modified TZXDuino/MaxDuino code is just impressive! The ability to record is just amazing, I think it is the most significant thing about it. A small correction: Atmega2560 is not a faster or more capable MCU compared to Atmega328 we all know. It has the same speed and same processing capability. Just has more RAM, more flash memory and more IO pins etc. It is the MCU used in Arduino Mega.
I have tested the recording in several (not all) of the machines and it works just fine. I didn't think it was necessary to show it in all of them. You can count on it working as well as it did on the Amstrad on those platforms.
Thanks for this in-depth review! I've been looking for something like this that can also just play generic wav files as I have quite a few obscure computers.
Double insulated switch-mode power supplies can cause issues like the video interference you are seeing. The problem is that the 0V side of the DC output is not referenced to mains ground and can float up to 90VAC above ground (depending on the internal isolation). You often get "tingles" off of the DC barrel plug if you touch it with damp fingers.
Fantastic video as always! Kepe up the good work :) Really impressed by your storage box solution for keeping your old micros - care to share where you got them from?
The weird, moving, glitchy-looking graphics flickering on loading screens were deliberate. They used memory addresses reserved for screen output bytes as program stack dumps and as buffers for file loads. An obstruction vs hackers - anything typed on screen (especially carriage returns) would overwrite critical data or crash active runcode.
in italy cassettes were extremely popular, families usually had their c64 hooked up only when they were used, in the livingroom or whatever, the datassette was just easier to move around and several parents were also scared by the burning powerbrick aswell :D the media was also easier to get and copy around ofcourse, which helped :D. magazines were full of cassettes with bootleg games at the time
Let's not forget that a disk drive was almost as expensive as the c64. However I remember a few magazines in Italy came out with games on floppies around 1988-1990.
You know what, this thing is actually useful for me, my Spectrum 128k +2 actually has a somewhat caputz tape drive and this can help it come back to life, though I may be more interested in a SD to 3" Floppy adapter/converter.
Excellent video and product especially if you have a significant collection of euro 8 bits. Not surprised there was problems with the oric/atmos. I could not get my cousins oric to load anything back in the 80s and I think the manufacturers had to make a significant change to the cassette part of the rom for subsequent versions of oric/atmos.
There are also multiple revisions of the motherboards with different values of capacitors and resistors on the tape circuitry, resulting in some machines requiring vastly different input volumes to proper load games.
For the powersupply just make a 2 cell lithium pack. No boosting no AC ripple. Also you could probably unplug the power after the loading is complete. I had to do that for a contemporary super nintendo game copier... using a sega master system adapter... it was so noisy.
In the UK and probably europe in general the tape was more common for case, in the us disks. Here in NZ I think fair to say disks as well, certainly that was the case in the late 80s/early 90s
Noel, thanks for the awesome video! I would love to see a video (if even it is a short one) on your storage box solution! I love the color printed labels, and the sturdiness of the boxes.. I would love to see more of how you store your machines as it's very relevant to retro computer collectors everywhere! :) I did see the link you posted on another comment - looks like a Spanish site. I would love to see how the machines and accessories fit inside, and if you use foam inserts at all. If you could also cover what sizes of boxes you have used, it would be helpful to eliminate some of that guesswork for those of us who would like to order some of these boxes. I see they are separate top and bottom pieces - I wonder if they can make a single unit box with a flip top lid, or if you think separate top pieces work better? Thanks again for all your awesome content, Noel!
Interesting to hear about the comments regarding the Acorn Electron version of Chuckie Egg. For me, it's an iconic game on that platform and I have fond memories of playing it for many hours but I also guess it's whatever you were used to.
The fact it can be used to saved directly to the SD card is quite interesting, that would make things like ripping a tape game into a usable emulator file much easier than the usual methods: Load the real tape from a real tape deck, save the data to the SVI-CAS, guess that would work? Specifically for the Oric, it could be interesting to have a way to select the volume level, because some machines expect a low volume and some other expect a high volume, being able to set that would probably help for some machines.
I recorded all my BBC Micro 8bit tapes onto my PC as .wav files, then used a £10 mobile phone to load them back onto the BBC Micro. Just use Audacity (free) to save the output, and if you have any tapes that don't load you can amplify sections of the sound to make dead copies of data work again! Saving the data from tape to PC and then to disk format is more difficult as you'd need additional software to do that.
@@TheVicar Trust me, I've done a number of conversion, the Oric software is a pain to get right, not two publishers used the same input volume and azimuth/alignment, and not all Oric load the same tape with the same volume setting. We do have tools that can convert a WAV file to an emulator format, decoding the edges, etc... but it's very common to end up with a non working file. Since most games have only very primitive protections, it's much easier to disable the auto-run, load the tape on the physical machine, and then save it back to something else (which could be indeed a PC input) because at least now you have a proper/clean signal. But if the SVI-CAS can do all that conversion on the fly that would be much easier, faster and reliable :)
Awesome unit. I don’t really need another way of getting data into my Commodore 64. But I want one anyway! And the fact it will work with other systems is awesome and a reason to buy more systems!
I would want something like this to work with any computer designed to work with a standard tape recorder. I mean it's nice that it's able to scan the images for file headers, etc., but it would be nice to be able to use it in a generic mode with some random obscure computer, as long as it doesn't require a special tape interface. Well, I should have listened to the end, because you confirmed that it does!
It looks as if the version of Chuckie Egg running on the Electron was the BBC Micro version which explains the speed issue (the birds on the Electron version are Magenta due to the different screen mode with fewer colours).
Ah, that explains a lot! I was told it was a great game on the Electron, so I was shocked to see that. I guess those are the dangers of "almost compatibility". That must have been "fun" back in the day!
I think the Commando loading rutine is the original one from Elite. I had the game on my younger days and I remember exactly the same loading screen and music...
There's also the Arduitape Cassette Player, which can support most retro computers and comes in at about 1/2 of the price of the SVI-CAS. It doesn't support saving though. It has the same limitations as the tzxduino, and can only support files up to 32k hz sample rate. You have to convert all of your tape files to wave format, which is going to take up more room on an SD card. It can be hard to find a program to convert tape formats to wave, for some systems.
We'd have absolutely loved this game back in the day. These days loading cartridge files (C64) or disk images is better, and TZX files, in the case of the ZX Spectrum. However, this device is a nice option if you have real hardwares.
This gives away my age, but my TRS-80 Model III had 16Kb of Ram. Some programs ran out of memory. Tape drive was the hard drive. Took ages for some things. I'm sure this device would work on a TRS-80.
FYI Commando on the 64 did have a loader like that (but no glitching!), it was one of my favourite games, so much so I purchased the arcade version! Also, in the UK most people had tapes as disk drives were VERY expensive!
I love your videos. Brings back some memories. I know the Apple IIc was not huge in Europe, but it was my first computer and very popular here in Canada. Could you please cover that. I upgraded mine with an Allied Engineering kit to 640k and a 65c816 processor. It was so capable. Thanks.
Taped programs are just audio signals. As long as we continue to preserve what we want to be loaded in the future, it's best to have as first priority to support those who host audio files we care about. Gadgets and mediums will come and go.
I'm then best Retro audio device. I type Run" and plug in a Mic and start squealing at my Amstrad in the most extraordinary way. Occasionally I get 'something' but often I just crash due to an over exercised larynx.
Commando? Try the CGA version on an XT with internal speaker sound and you get an idea on how good this game's music and video really was on the C64 ;-)
I looked into this about 6 months ago, but the shipping from Australia to the U.K. was insane. I would have liked a more in depth review of the recording feature as that is what I'm after, there are too many players and, as far as I know, this is the only recorder.
@@NoelsRetroLab I need something like this for my ZX81. Can you choose the save format ? (Wav/tzx/p). Can you port the saved files into emulators ? But again, the main problem is the shipping costs. :)
I found that a £10 Alcatel phone from my local supermarket is perfect for loading games onto my BBC Micro B. All you need is a phone, without any fancy graphic equaliser, which plays .wav files and you're ready to go.
Build yourself a portable power supply of a 2x18650 case and a small boost module. Or just order a USB->9V cable (same, but it is already built with barrel output cable) and you can use any powerbank. The most expensive is buying a nice box to be built into...
This does seem cool and I appreciate the review. I think the metaphor you chose is somewhat more apt than you may have initally realized, too. Corolla: inexpensive and not the prettiest car at the show but highly customizable by the user and tons of aftermarket parts Model X: sleek and speedy but pricey and hard to find and not as customizable by the user Personally, I'll go for a Corolla--or, rather, I'll pick an open source project I can build from a kit because that's a huge part of the fun of this hobby for me but I can see the appeal of something like this for people who are willing to spend more at the outset to get something turnkey.
Apple used a very different encoding system than everyone else (typical Woz), but it ought to be possible if there's space to add the extra firmware required. There's much less out there on tape for the Apple ][, mainly because cheap floppy drives was one of its key selling points, but there might be tape images of some of the really early stuff. Having used a real cassette recorder on an Apple ][ I can say the process was painful to get working reliably, much more so than later machines like the ZX Spectrum, so unless you have a really really good reason for wanting to use the casette interface, disks or a disk emulator will be far easier to deal with. Still, if only for the sake of completeness, it would be nice to see working. Apple 1 compatibility, for those of us with reproductions, would actually be useful because as far as I'm aware that never got a disk interface.
Great device I want one. Based on personal experience in the 80s UK, nearly every c64 owner used tapes. I had dozens of friends with a C64 and I was the only one with a floppy drive, and that was probably due to my dad teaching computing on them. Tapes ruled because they were cheap and easy to copy. I'd say most kids in the 80s more than half of their games where pirated. You could copy a dozen games on a 90min tape Disk drives seemed more popular in the US.
Great video! But you should do fixing videos as you’ve always did. Showing the investigation, issue, fixing, etc. don’t forget the content that made you great on TH-cam! Keep the great work!
The was a GE portable recorder FOR COMPUTERS that came with 4 different adapters to match the most prominent micros of the era. I believe it was the "compu mate" .... something like that. It was pretty small, probably a crappy transport comming from GE
Did you test Spectrum multiload games, something like Gauntlet where you have to load chunks of levels in, plus wind the tape forward and back sometimes?
Hmmm, ok, one more very important detail about the ATMEL 2560, you can actually use external RAM with it (Fast Page if I recall correctly) so that can help with the RAM issues you referred, I recall a 512Kb expansion made for the thing.
Tapes are/were popular on Commodore 8bits in Europe, and here in the UK.. these days we have SD card solutions like SD2IEC and Kung Fu flash etc like I use. I still use tapes or .tap files as so much software only got a tape version and not disk as tapes were very cheap and popular in the UK where a big percentage of software was coded and sold.
Will it work on Commodore’s 264 series? C16 and the Plus 4? I mean I’m happy with the pi1541 which works great I’m just curious. Love your channel dude, greetings from New Zealand.
It's my understanding that the VIC-20 was almost always cartridges. You get more memory for games that way. The RAM expansion was not common from what I've heard. For the C64 things are different. Cartridges have memory limitations that disks and tapes don't have. So the cartridges weren't all that common especially after the first few years. There are ways around it, but it requires extra hardware making the cart cost more. As for disk/tape I've heard that in the USA it was mostly disks and in Europe it was mostly tape. However most tape programs seem to have been converted over to disk. Tape is a lot slower so it makes sense that in these modern times where you can get cheap 1541 replacements or something awesome like 1541 U2+ or the backbit, tape lost its appeal. I've noticed that today tapes are harder to find online than back around 2000 or so. I used to find tapes for download all the time back then. I did get the tape adapter for my U2+, but I've never used it. It only cost $5 more so I'm like why not.
As for the Commodore cartridges I knew nobody who had one for their C64. With the VIC-20, yes, cartridges were used but I remember all users having a tape drive.
@@oldguy9051 well yeah you kind of had to. It was pretty much the only way to save things. I think the 1541 was added at the end of the life of the VIC-20. Before that it was just tapes. I did have some C64 carts, but only like 1 or 2 of them.
@@oldguy9051 the only cartridges that were really popular on the C64 were fast loaders and freezers. The VIC20 had a few ram expansions that were needed by a bunch of games, but they shifted the memory addresses, so they also came with a switch to disable them. I remember playing radar rat race on mine, but I get PTSD just remembering the music. 😂
During the Output Wave and Speed Testing segment you kept quoting smaller values of "cycles" for faster signals... did you mean "milliseconds" or am I missing something? (Wouldn't be the first time.) This device is quite the piece of kit, and shows how retro enthusiasts are merging modern small-scale hardware to make older 8-bit and 16 bit retro gear shine into the twenty-first century. Thank you for showing it off!
You're right. I switched to cycles (or Z80 t-cycles, which are 250ns) See more background here: 8bitnotes.com/2017/05/z80-timing/ . You can see the motivation for that on the other video I made about trying to load audio data as quickly as possible, since it's locked to the Z80 speed.
Interesting little box. When you loaded onto the ZX Spectrum it seemed very fast to me. But then again the cassette interface is very slow using two fixed frequencies. So did you just speed up the video or was the game very small?
Tested no Turbo-Tape on the C64? FYI the native cassette routines were practically only used to load Turbo-Tape. A 60 minutes tape can hold a bunch of games, as kids we had many many of them.. And what about other commercial fastloaders? Does the SVI-CAS know about them, can you make an image from an original game?
Hmm, the developer could easily added a serial to bluetooth adapter and allow you to type the text on your PC or smartphone (in fact control the whole thing that way, likely a good idea to pass on to the developer :) )
I wonder how useful it is to have jacks on the device, when a 9 pin canon connector could have grouped audio in, audio out and remote in a single plug.
One thing that I was wondering is if for some reason the C64 cable to someone but if they had a working dataset and a cassette to CD/MP3 adapter on hand, would that work to load tape files?
tape drive yes...they where not standard audio cassettes tho, more like a digital tape and drive for it to fit....i have one sitting in my collection..usually they used for just backups, never for actually working with on the daily...
This is quite easily the most underrated retro tech channel on TH-cam. Always great, interesting content.
Glad you think so! 😃 Thank you!
@@NoelsRetroLab I was about to say I'd love to see more regarding how fast you can load audio - then I got to the bit of the video where you said you'll be making a video about it.
The video about how fast you can load from a cassette is the video that made me subscribe.
Once again, you helped a retro designer to improve his product. Good job! Great video!
The Shift/RunStop key function on the C64 is inherited from the even older 1977 Commodore PET, which as you probably know was designed with tape in mind. The function is built into the screen editor which as far as I can see was copied wholesale into the VIC 20 and C64. Also, for some reason a lot of people in the UK (one of Commodores biggest markets outside the USA) also used tapes for the C64 (in the early 80s few people could afford disk drives, (possibly because of unfavorable exchange rates?) so most games were sold as cassette. It really wasn't until the late 80s that disk drives became cheap enough for the "average" game player to afford.
Yeah, price was a problem in the UK. IIRC the 1541 cost about as much as the 64 itself, so hurt its selling point of being relatively inexpensive and competitive with the other 8-bit micros. I suspect the culture surrounding the UK home computer boom was a bit different to the US computer scene too, which might have had an impact on the cost that each market was prepared to accept.
I think cost was a problem even later in the C64's life, because the cost of a C64+1541 was uncomfortably close to that of an Amiga or Atari ST.
@@Silanda Yes, the first time I noticed a floppy drive being "cheap" was around '85/86 when Dixons were selling the Atari 800XL & 1050 floppy drive cheap in an attempt to sell off the XL stock with the arrival of the new redesigned XE machines. At the time I wasn't so into the C64 so I didn't notice the prices but I do recall complaints in the computer magazines about how expensive they were compared to the other computers.
Partly unfavourable exchange rates. Partly a tradition among computer sellers and manufacturers to not apply any exchange rate at all! So if something cost $499, it would be priced in the UK at £499, at a time when £1 was worth about $2 ! This continued into the 1990s with all sorts of gear including PCs and their parts. I think it's the Internet that finally got them to cut it out, giving people a choice of importing themselves, or at least seeing American prices and realising how much they were being ripped off!
Now we can order stuff for peanuts directly from China, and the only issue is things being dangerous and shoddily made.
I wish I had one eighth of the electrical engineering skins of this dude...
Brilliant video. Love the detail in the range of computers used (I have an Enterprise, a original Z80, various Acorns, Commodores and Spectrum machines and Amstrad too, so I can use them for that tape experience); the oscilloscope work, and how you worked with the maker to fix the Oric issue.
Thanks! Glad you liked it and glad to see another person with broad retro tastes like me 😃
@@NoelsRetroLab Thanks: I'm just emailing the seller citing your review and asking if he ships to the UK (with C64 and other cables). I hope he supports the Enterprise soon.
p.s.
(Oh and have PC Engines, Atari Lynx mk1, PHILIPS G7000 Videopac and other Sega and Nintendo stuff, but had mods for those. Got matching monitors too, except for the Sinclair line)
FYI...we had the official tape deck for C64...disk drives where too expensive..alot of the shops also sold cassettes for the C64
nice vid...thanks Noel
Same where I lived back then. *Every* C64 user I knew had the "datasette" until the disk drives came down in price. Drives were extremely expensive back then, pretty much as expensive or even more than a C64. I don't know if it really was more expensive to make but wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.
But when the user got a disk drive there was no looking back - even though the C64/1541 combo suffered from that infamous firmware bug that made the drive slower than it needed to be. When floppy speeders entered the scene, tapes were laughed at.
Yes, there were tape speeders, too, but who wanted a tape when you have a floppy with a directory, sequential access, still faster loading and usually much more reliable (if we forget the overheating problem for a moment...).
Same here, we had around 100 tapes !!!!. The 1531, when properly alligned and mantained, barely failled. Tapes were better than people think. A bit slow ... but hey ... the 80s magic.
yeah, nearly everyone I knew in UK with c64 used tapes
Where are you based, though? Although Noel doesn't actually mention that, I for some reason automatically assumed he was talking about users in the US (maybe because Commodore was American?). I do know over here in Europe cassettes were probably the most common media for C64 games.
@@BilisNegra australia here... by the time i had C64s at home, disc drives where all the thing, but we where stuck with tape (even tho step brother actually worked for commodore australia!)...my cousin had a C64 with disc drive from early on and thats where i learnt to add *",8,1 ...tapes where just the cheaper medium i guess and i was used to them from CPC days
Here in the UK nearly all computer users used tape, even the C64 which wasn't as popular as in the US most people still used tape. Mainly because the drives were so damn expensive over here and besides tapes were so cheap and easy to copy 🏴☠️.
Same in Spain, first computer I saw with a DD was the Amiga 500. My first floppy disk experience was with my 286 computer, and I loved it, when your parents are limiting the time you have to play with the computer, the tape really sucks, and many times you cant even load the game :( AZIMUT NIGHTMARES
In Canada, every computer of the era was automatically equipped with a disk drive. Mostly Made in Taiwan knockoffs, cheap, common, and surprisingly good.
You just couldn't buy or sell software on tapes, there was no market for them.
Even tho I will never ever need a device like this, it is hard not to applaud the creators of this perfect blend of retro and modern tech that serves a need that is so niche.
This SVI-CAS seems like an excellent product. Considering the tremendous amount of work involved in such a project, $85 AU is an excellent value. I was expecting $200 or more. Another excellent video Noel.
I'm glad you reviewed this. I was able to order mine recently (along with all the cables). I look forward to receiving it. I noticed as you removed each computer from your shelves that you seemed to have reasonably similar boxes. I wondered where you got them. I have several computers without boxes that I would like to protect better (they are only wrapped in anti-static bags).
Excellent. I'm sure you'll enjoy it. I got my boxes from a small box company with lots of different sizes, so I got the ones to match the computers exactly. I really like this set up. www.embalen.com/shop/ver/cajas-de-carton-automontables/cajas-de-carton-de-tapa-y-fondo
Yes, try this device with a ZX81/TS1000. A full -featured video on this computer would be nice as well. This computer was responsible for many of us learning Z80 assembly due to it's limited abilities. Then things like hi-res graphics and an extended BASIC instruction set, etc. became possible. It forced those of us on an extremely limited budget to either give up or press on to vastly exceed the limits of what Sinclair ever thought the machine was capable of. I chose the latter.
Looks great, I want one! A couple of UX things I think would improve it a little as well:
1. Left and right arrow keys either side of the computer selection box, so you can go backwards as well as forwards through the list
2. With the On-Screen Keyboard, make the keys larger by only showing upper OR lower case at the same time, rather than both, and switch between them with a Shift Key option
3. Show a message giving the tape load command to enter at the computer prior to commencing loading, so you don't need to refer to the manual
C64 tape decks were huge in England and Australia.
The commando loader (with music playing) is from the original release. However, not corrupted like that :\
The ability to record alone makes this worthwhile. It's not a feature nessecary for EVERY game, but if you have any interest in text adventures, many would require you to save between parts and carry objects between one part and another, something that can't really be done with a TZXduino.
A great review of a fabulous device - definitely on my wish list!
Wow, that's a really nice device!!!Thanks for sharing with us Noel!! Greetings, Michael
My pleasure!
The Commodore C64 and Vic20 were really lightly evolved versions of the Commodore PET, which were aimed at business and schools. The Pets definitely didn't have cartridges. Early units shipped with cassette built in. I think there was an idea that it doubled as an IO device as well as tape playback for typists doing transcriptions. In school, we had a computer lab that had several pets. They all shared one floppy drive, but some units had external tape drives that were not shared.
OK... Another retro related gadget that I need to spend money on... :) I will use this on Spectrums and C64, so I would appreciate a follow video up on the recording capability on these machines too. The fact that the code is written from scratch and not being a modified TZXDuino/MaxDuino code is just impressive!
The ability to record is just amazing, I think it is the most significant thing about it.
A small correction: Atmega2560 is not a faster or more capable MCU compared to Atmega328 we all know. It has the same speed and same processing capability. Just has more RAM, more flash memory and more IO pins etc. It is the MCU used in Arduino Mega.
I have tested the recording in several (not all) of the machines and it works just fine. I didn't think it was necessary to show it in all of them. You can count on it working as well as it did on the Amstrad on those platforms.
Thanks for this in-depth review! I've been looking for something like this that can also just play generic wav files as I have quite a few obscure computers.
Glad it was helpful! It sounds like it's exactly what you're looking for then 👍
@@NoelsRetroLab My Tandy 102, Sega SC-3000 and Epson HX-20 say thank you. 🙂
Good point, should test it with some pocket computers.
Would "luv to have a beer with Duncan". And you too Noel. Great video. Cheers.
Great video as always Noel, I can't believe the price of this device considering everything it does. I'm going to have to add one to the collection. 😁
He he. The old Oric creating trouble, as usual. Excelent video, Noel. As always.
Nice to see this also works for the Atari line as well.
Time for fun has arrived!!!
Double insulated switch-mode power supplies can cause issues like the video interference you are seeing. The problem is that the 0V side of the DC output is not referenced to mains ground and can float up to 90VAC above ground (depending on the internal isolation). You often get "tingles" off of the DC barrel plug if you touch it with damp fingers.
Fantastic video as always! Kepe up the good work :) Really impressed by your storage box solution for keeping your old micros - care to share where you got them from?
That's pretty impressive that it could load something on the Acorn Electron. Mine is a nightmare and very rarely loads anything.
The weird, moving, glitchy-looking graphics flickering on loading screens were deliberate.
They used memory addresses reserved for screen output bytes as program stack dumps and as buffers for file loads. An obstruction vs hackers - anything typed on screen (especially carriage returns) would overwrite critical data or crash active runcode.
Love the Sabreman T shirt
That’s actually a fun product. And I love your storage facility!
in italy cassettes were extremely popular, families usually had their c64 hooked up only when they were used, in the livingroom or whatever, the datassette was just easier to move around and several parents were also scared by the burning powerbrick aswell :D
the media was also easier to get and copy around ofcourse, which helped :D. magazines were full of cassettes with bootleg games at the time
Let's not forget that a disk drive was almost as expensive as the c64. However I remember a few magazines in Italy came out with games on floppies around 1988-1990.
@@bufordmaddogtannen but of course! i also remember jackson libri had quite a few publications with lovely floppies
@@lordmuaddib and horrible translations. 😁
@@bufordmaddogtannen indeed! :D
You know what, this thing is actually useful for me, my Spectrum 128k +2 actually has a somewhat caputz tape drive and this can help it come back to life, though I may be more interested in a SD to 3" Floppy adapter/converter.
But can it rewind/fast forward/reset counter & rewind tape to here? .. until it can, the c64 datasette will win everytime.
Excellent video and product especially if you have a significant collection of euro 8 bits. Not surprised there was problems with the oric/atmos. I could not get my cousins oric to load anything back in the 80s and I think the manufacturers had to make a significant change to the cassette part of the rom for subsequent versions of oric/atmos.
There are also multiple revisions of the motherboards with different values of capacitors and resistors on the tape circuitry, resulting in some machines requiring vastly different input volumes to proper load games.
For the powersupply just make a 2 cell lithium pack. No boosting no AC ripple.
Also you could probably unplug the power after the loading is complete. I had to do that for a contemporary super nintendo game copier... using a sega master system adapter... it was so noisy.
In the UK and probably europe in general the tape was more common for case, in the us disks. Here in NZ I think fair to say disks as well, certainly that was the case in the late 80s/early 90s
Noel, thanks for the awesome video! I would love to see a video (if even it is a short one) on your storage box solution! I love the color printed labels, and the sturdiness of the boxes.. I would love to see more of how you store your machines as it's very relevant to retro computer collectors everywhere! :) I did see the link you posted on another comment - looks like a Spanish site. I would love to see how the machines and accessories fit inside, and if you use foam inserts at all. If you could also cover what sizes of boxes you have used, it would be helpful to eliminate some of that guesswork for those of us who would like to order some of these boxes. I see they are separate top and bottom pieces - I wonder if they can make a single unit box with a flip top lid, or if you think separate top pieces work better?
Thanks again for all your awesome content, Noel!
Interesting to hear about the comments regarding the Acorn Electron version of Chuckie Egg. For me, it's an iconic game on that platform and I have fond memories of playing it for many hours but I also guess it's whatever you were used to.
The fact it can be used to saved directly to the SD card is quite interesting, that would make things like ripping a tape game into a usable emulator file much easier than the usual methods: Load the real tape from a real tape deck, save the data to the SVI-CAS, guess that would work?
Specifically for the Oric, it could be interesting to have a way to select the volume level, because some machines expect a low volume and some other expect a high volume, being able to set that would probably help for some machines.
I recorded all my BBC Micro 8bit tapes onto my PC as .wav files, then used a £10 mobile phone to load them back onto the BBC Micro. Just use Audacity (free) to save the output, and if you have any tapes that don't load you can amplify sections of the sound to make dead copies of data work again!
Saving the data from tape to PC and then to disk format is more difficult as you'd need additional software to do that.
@@TheVicar Trust me, I've done a number of conversion, the Oric software is a pain to get right, not two publishers used the same input volume and azimuth/alignment, and not all Oric load the same tape with the same volume setting.
We do have tools that can convert a WAV file to an emulator format, decoding the edges, etc... but it's very common to end up with a non working file.
Since most games have only very primitive protections, it's much easier to disable the auto-run, load the tape on the physical machine, and then save it back to something else (which could be indeed a PC input) because at least now you have a proper/clean signal. But if the SVI-CAS can do all that conversion on the fly that would be much easier, faster and reliable :)
I used tape deck in the day (and still ofcourse) on my C64. They were very common in the Netherlands
Awesome unit. I don’t really need another way of getting data into my Commodore 64. But I want one anyway! And the fact it will work with other systems is awesome and a reason to buy more systems!
I would want something like this to work with any computer designed to work with a standard tape recorder. I mean it's nice that it's able to scan the images for file headers, etc., but it would be nice to be able to use it in a generic mode with some random obscure computer, as long as it doesn't require a special tape interface.
Well, I should have listened to the end, because you confirmed that it does!
It looks as if the version of Chuckie Egg running on the Electron was the BBC Micro version which explains the speed issue (the birds on the Electron version are Magenta due to the different screen mode with fewer colours).
Ah, that explains a lot! I was told it was a great game on the Electron, so I was shocked to see that. I guess those are the dangers of "almost compatibility". That must have been "fun" back in the day!
I think the Commando loading rutine is the original one from Elite. I had the game on my younger days and I remember exactly the same loading screen and music...
There's also the Arduitape Cassette Player, which can support most retro computers and comes in at about 1/2 of the price of the SVI-CAS. It doesn't support saving though.
It has the same limitations as the tzxduino, and can only support files up to 32k hz sample rate. You have to convert all of your tape files to wave format, which is going to take up more room on an SD card. It can be hard to find a program to convert tape formats to wave, for some systems.
We'd have absolutely loved this game back in the day. These days loading cartridge files (C64) or disk images is better, and TZX files, in the case of the ZX Spectrum. However, this device is a nice option if you have real hardwares.
This gives away my age, but my TRS-80 Model III had 16Kb of Ram. Some programs ran out of memory. Tape drive was the hard drive. Took ages for some things. I'm sure this device would work on a TRS-80.
I got my SVI-CAS and love it.
FYI Commando on the 64 did have a loader like that (but no glitching!), it was one of my favourite games, so much so I purchased the arcade version! Also, in the UK most people had tapes as disk drives were VERY expensive!
I love your videos. Brings back some memories. I know the Apple IIc was not huge in Europe, but it was my first computer and very popular here in Canada. Could you please cover that. I upgraded mine with an Allied Engineering kit to 640k and a 65c816 processor. It was so capable. Thanks.
Excellent Review, I will be ordering for sure.
Definitely worth it! 👍
It is a nice item! I would like to see TI-99/4A FIAD format supported too!
You should reach out to Ducan. He might be motivated to add if you bug him enough 😃
@@NoelsRetroLab oh yes, I have sent a message to him using the email in the manual. I would love to write a review for the TI99iuc website too :)
Bringing back nightmares. I hated tape loading when I was a kid! (Thankfully my Apple //c had a built-in floppy drive)
I'm glad I could help 🤣 At least with this device tape loading is reliable, unlike real tapes.
Taped programs are just audio signals. As long as we continue to preserve what we want to be loaded in the future, it's best to have as first priority to support those who host audio files we care about. Gadgets and mediums will come and go.
As long as people save them as .wav format then we can save the past from deletion. MP3 compression happily destroys data.
I'm then best Retro audio device. I type Run" and plug in a Mic and start squealing at my Amstrad in the most extraordinary way. Occasionally I get 'something' but often I just crash due to an over exercised larynx.
🤣
Commando? Try the CGA version on an XT with internal speaker sound and you get an idea on how good this game's music and video really was on the C64 ;-)
looks very neat! I'm assuming every 'load' was sped up massively, It would have been handy to show how much.
I looked into this about 6 months ago, but the shipping from Australia to the U.K. was insane.
I would have liked a more in depth review of the recording feature as that is what I'm after, there are too many players and, as far as I know, this is the only recorder.
What would you like to know about the recording? I did a few tests (not in all of them) and it simply just worked like it did on the Amstrad.
@@NoelsRetroLab I need something like this for my ZX81. Can you choose the save format ? (Wav/tzx/p). Can you port the saved files into emulators ? But again, the main problem is the shipping costs. :)
I found that a £10 Alcatel phone from my local supermarket is perfect for loading games onto my BBC Micro B. All you need is a phone, without any fancy graphic equaliser, which plays .wav files and you're ready to go.
The loading music for Commando appears to be Livng on Video by Trans X.
As written already I would imagine, In the UK, I didn't know anyone with a C64 disk drive; was too expensive. Was all tapes. Great video though :-)
Build yourself a portable power supply of a 2x18650 case and a small boost module. Or just order a USB->9V cable (same, but it is already built with barrel output cable) and you can use any powerbank. The most expensive is buying a nice box to be built into...
This does seem cool and I appreciate the review. I think the metaphor you chose is somewhat more apt than you may have initally realized, too.
Corolla: inexpensive and not the prettiest car at the show but highly customizable by the user and tons of aftermarket parts
Model X: sleek and speedy but pricey and hard to find and not as customizable by the user
Personally, I'll go for a Corolla--or, rather, I'll pick an open source project I can build from a kit because that's a huge part of the fun of this hobby for me but I can see the appeal of something like this for people who are willing to spend more at the outset to get something turnkey.
A good name for it; The UniCAS, short and simple... :)
Pretty cool looking
Thanks for sharing!! I wonder if it would work with your Apple II, even though it's not listed. That would be interesting to see
Apple used a very different encoding system than everyone else (typical Woz), but it ought to be possible if there's space to add the extra firmware required. There's much less out there on tape for the Apple ][, mainly because cheap floppy drives was one of its key selling points, but there might be tape images of some of the really early stuff. Having used a real cassette recorder on an Apple ][ I can say the process was painful to get working reliably, much more so than later machines like the ZX Spectrum, so unless you have a really really good reason for wanting to use the casette interface, disks or a disk emulator will be far easier to deal with. Still, if only for the sake of completeness, it would be nice to see working. Apple 1 compatibility, for those of us with reproductions, would actually be useful because as far as I'm aware that never got a disk interface.
The C64 was inundated with tape games. I do not know anyone who had a disc drive for it.
Great device I want one.
Based on personal experience in the 80s UK, nearly every c64 owner used tapes. I had dozens of friends with a C64 and I was the only one with a floppy drive, and that was probably due to my dad teaching computing on them.
Tapes ruled because they were cheap and easy to copy. I'd say most kids in the 80s more than half of their games where pirated. You could copy a dozen games on a 90min tape
Disk drives seemed more popular in the US.
Great video! But you should do fixing videos as you’ve always did. Showing the investigation, issue, fixing, etc. don’t forget the content that made you great on TH-cam! Keep the great work!
The was a GE portable recorder FOR COMPUTERS that came with 4 different adapters to match the most prominent micros of the era. I believe it was the "compu mate" .... something like that. It was pretty small, probably a crappy transport comming from GE
On the C64 thing. Disks were common in the USA, but everywhere else used tapes.
BTW, you can use the Shift&RunStop with floppy too : try 'load"*",8Shift&RunStop'
Here in the UK we all used tape for the C64 , nobody had a disk drive
Did you test Spectrum multiload games, something like Gauntlet where you have to load chunks of levels in, plus wind the tape forward and back sometimes?
Very cool design. For some weird reason the link to the ordering site doesn't load... it hangs 🤔🤷♂️
Awesome review, Noel! Thanks!
Loving the Sabreman T-shirt, by the way! =)
Just found this: Thats really cool!
Ooh yeah I'd like to see a Z81 repair vid.
DUDE! Remember that MSX emulator cartridge for the SVI-328? What about loading MSX games on the SVI with the SVI-CAS?
UniCAS would be a great name imo
cool video noel keep up the good work i always look forward to new video's from you
Hmmm, ok, one more very important detail about the ATMEL 2560, you can actually use external RAM with it (Fast Page if I recall correctly) so that can help with the RAM issues you referred, I recall a 512Kb expansion made for the thing.
Tapes are/were popular on Commodore 8bits in Europe, and here in the UK.. these days we have SD card solutions like SD2IEC and Kung Fu flash etc like I use. I still use tapes or .tap files as so much software only got a tape version and not disk as tapes were very cheap and popular in the UK where a big percentage of software was coded and sold.
Will it work on Commodore’s 264 series? C16 and the Plus 4? I mean I’m happy with the pi1541 which works great I’m just curious. Love your channel dude, greetings from New Zealand.
Yes, it does! I just don't happen to have any to test them with. But they're listed in the manual as supported. Thanks! 😃
It's my understanding that the VIC-20 was almost always cartridges. You get more memory for games that way. The RAM expansion was not common from what I've heard. For the C64 things are different. Cartridges have memory limitations that disks and tapes don't have. So the cartridges weren't all that common especially after the first few years. There are ways around it, but it requires extra hardware making the cart cost more. As for disk/tape I've heard that in the USA it was mostly disks and in Europe it was mostly tape. However most tape programs seem to have been converted over to disk. Tape is a lot slower so it makes sense that in these modern times where you can get cheap 1541 replacements or something awesome like 1541 U2+ or the backbit, tape lost its appeal. I've noticed that today tapes are harder to find online than back around 2000 or so. I used to find tapes for download all the time back then. I did get the tape adapter for my U2+, but I've never used it. It only cost $5 more so I'm like why not.
As for the Commodore cartridges I knew nobody who had one for their C64. With the VIC-20, yes, cartridges were used but I remember all users having a tape drive.
@@oldguy9051 well yeah you kind of had to. It was pretty much the only way to save things. I think the 1541 was added at the end of the life of the VIC-20. Before that it was just tapes. I did have some C64 carts, but only like 1 or 2 of them.
@@oldguy9051 the only cartridges that were really popular on the C64 were fast loaders and freezers. The VIC20 had a few ram expansions that were needed by a bunch of games, but they shifted the memory addresses, so they also came with a switch to disable them.
I remember playing radar rat race on mine, but I get PTSD just remembering the music. 😂
During the Output Wave and Speed Testing segment you kept quoting smaller values of "cycles" for faster signals... did you mean "milliseconds" or am I missing something? (Wouldn't be the first time.)
This device is quite the piece of kit, and shows how retro enthusiasts are merging modern small-scale hardware to make older 8-bit and 16 bit retro gear shine into the twenty-first century. Thank you for showing it off!
You're right. I switched to cycles (or Z80 t-cycles, which are 250ns) See more background here: 8bitnotes.com/2017/05/z80-timing/ . You can see the motivation for that on the other video I made about trying to load audio data as quickly as possible, since it's locked to the Z80 speed.
Question. Would this unit work on a Commodore PET?
Slightly off topic: where did you get that Knight Lore T-Shirt?? I love it :)
Interesting little box. When you loaded onto the ZX Spectrum it seemed very fast to me. But then again the cassette interface is very slow using two fixed frequencies. So did you just speed up the video or was the game very small?
Tested no Turbo-Tape on the C64? FYI the native cassette routines were practically only used to load Turbo-Tape. A 60 minutes tape can hold a bunch of games, as kids we had many many of them.. And what about other commercial fastloaders? Does the SVI-CAS know about them, can you make an image from an original game?
Are there any tape fast-loaders for Commodore PETs/CBMs?
Wind the psu cable around a ferrite ring and the noise will be gone. I do that with the cheap universal PSU, I use for anything between lambda and c16
Hmm, the developer could easily added a serial to bluetooth adapter and allow you to type the text on your PC or smartphone (in fact control the whole thing that way, likely a good idea to pass on to the developer :) )
I wonder how useful it is to have jacks on the device, when a 9 pin canon connector could have grouped audio in, audio out and remote in a single plug.
Does it work with a PET? Thank you
I second this question, does it work with Commodore PETs/CBMs?
I'd love to see TRS-80 systems like the I or III
Put some ferrite rings on the power supply cable
I'd be really interested in working with the owner of this to add the TI-99/4A to the firmware. Should be relatively easy.
One thing that I was wondering is if for some reason the C64 cable to someone but if they had a working dataset and a cassette to CD/MP3 adapter on hand, would that work to load tape files?
Didn't the OG IBM AT have support for tape files? I remember LGR talking about it a few years back. Would be awesome to see an AT PC boot from tape.
The IBM PC and PCjr definitely had cassette I/O but later models didn't (XT, AT...).
tape drive yes...they where not standard audio cassettes tho, more like a digital tape and drive for it to fit....i have one sitting in my collection..usually they used for just backups, never for actually working with on the daily...