To try everything Brilliant has to offer-free-for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/NoelsRetroLab/ . The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription.
You can bake the tape slightly. Thats how they make the material adhere back to the plastic. Always with tape you keep the high at 2+ and you will get good results. Also you can still buy shells you can move the tape into. Ive noticed the spindles on older tape shells can be very heavy. Hope i helped. I have been making audio tape collages for 20 years. So im not a scientist but i know tape. Lol.
@@NoelsRetroLab Also I'd say for valuable tapes like this one checking if the magnetic layer is sticky is a must before even attempting to put it into a deck. And if it is you should bake it first. And yes, the "damage" isn't really a damage, just that part of the tape absorbed water vapour throughout the ages and sticks to the heads/loses particles because of that. Tape baking is the process of drying the tape in controlled conditions. It's pretty easy to do.
I can see two ways of recovering the data from the volume dipped portion of the recording. The simple way is to add gain to the section of audio with the dip, which can be done right in Audacity. It does not have to be perfect but you can't raise the gain so much that it would peak; it just has to be loud enough for the signal highs and lows to be detected past a threshold. The second way is how we did it back in the 1980's - throw the source cassette into the left side of your hi-fi stereo system, throw a blank cassette into the right side, bump up the EQ a few decibels across all frequency ranges, hit record on the right side, play on the left side, and enjoy some of the weirdest progressive jams you have ever heard while it transfers the data to the new cassette. Even though it is data, it is still technically audio and therefore you can manipulate it the same way as audio.
If you can't fix a wobbly sound file by processing it, say the frequency is inconsistent due to tape stretch, it's really fun writing some code to interpret the sound file, It's mostly about counting zero crossings but can take some fiddling and tuning to get right. Most tape formats I played from had little to know error checking. I guess some has a very basic checksum. The exception was the C64, which had a very overengineered format which is why C64 tape loading and saving is so ridiculously slower that other systems of the era.
Great video Noel. I recently fired up my Amstrad CPC 464 from 1985 and tried loading programs from multiple cassettes that I had back in the day. To my surprise 90% of the cassettes loaded fine.
Awesome! I got a little bit emotionally moved, remembering how was my first time recovering games from my childhood and play them again many years later. That were my first steps in retrogaming, and I never stopped since then.
For the data recovery part, using a sound card that has a LINE-IN input would be preferable to a microphone input, to avoid the eventual filters and amplifiers of the mic input. And also, trying to have the volume as high as possible for recording (like ~80%) without it being saturated/clamped.
OMG ! An "Elephants never forget" floppy. I used to love those...well at least I loved the ads in magazines, as I never had a disk drive at the time for my Sinclair ZX Spectrum =)
Hey Noel, so I've recovered exactly things like that, with low volume, you had. If you zoom in all the way in audacity you'll be able to see a pattern. For the ZX81 it's something like short and long repeating pulses (3 vs 7 maybe if I remember). So if you can glean what each section should have been (i.e. you can usually still see how long each pattern was) you can just copy a good 1 or 0 (3 vs 7 pulses from the proper volume level) in the place of the bad (low volume) sections. As long as you don't add in too much of time difference, it doesn't have to align exactly, it should be fine. Worked a treat.
I played around a bit doing that, but didn't spend much time. Maybe being really careful about when to zoom in would help. I ended up posting the wavs in the Discord channel because multiple people wanted to try restoring it 😃
Noel, I had an old Sinclair Spectrum game on tape that went quiet in one part. I put it in Audacity went bonkers with the amplify till the quiet part was 100% and yes it clipped. I played it into the Spectrum first time after 35 years. I made a CD with the WAV file. I later found out the spectrum just counted the pulses on the tape. As long as the tape recorder amplifier does not distort you should be fine rescuing games. I hope that helps.
Nice! I did mess with that a bit, but not for very long. So maybe it's possible to do that as well. I put the wav files in the Discord channel since some people wanted to mess with them to try to do that same thing. Good to know it can work!
The keyboard looks to be the way the BBC Micro did it’s keys - you could thump them and the key mechanism was basically unaffected since it wasn’t the pressure of the key push that directly closed the contacts.
Sanyo products used to be very reliable, so it doesn't surprise me it ended up being the best tape deck for your purposes 😁. Can't speak for anything more modern though.
through audio editing i believe it's not really hard to restore that faulty area of the tape, i'm used to that kind of stuff in sound design and restoration, you can start by trying to just normalize the volume applying the "inverse" curve carefully... there are many ways, and it would be very useful to understand what's supposed to be the right wafeform for 1's and zeros ...
as a youngster, i get the feeling of nostalgia for things i experienced not many years ago. How nice it must have been to bring back memories from more than three decades ago. love it
Just to spread some knowledge, the type of key switches in the keyboard are of the stackpole variety. I would really like to see the PEB (Peripheral Expansion Box (the box with the disk drive)) up and running with John's game.
Great video! I donated my old ZX Spectrum to my friend along with a C90 full of programs I typed in from magazines - including a couple I wrote myself. He did the same and recovered the programs I wrote. It's such an intense nostalgia overload seeing something on the screen you wrote almost 40 years ago. It's quite moving.
When testing PSUs that aren't connected to anything, try putting the multimeter into AUTO-V LoZ. This will apply a small amount of load onto the device you are testing. So the power rails are not floating and giving weird or vague results. If your testing voltage in circuit, then yes use the normal voltage modes.
I wasn't screaming, but I was mentally sending the message. Yeah, one of those guys who had everything your neighbour had. Synth, joysticks, PEB, _and_ a Radio Shack replacement keyboard -- the one sold back in around 86 or so.
The mental message arrived loud and clear to the past and that's how I figured it out 🤣 Seriously, I wish they had added some kind of check instead of just letting you load the wrong BASIC. Oh well. Lesson learned!
Man, my TI99/4A is still sitting in a box with the games, controllers and tape player/recorder. Haven't used it in forever. I even still have some of those same books, dug them up to go with my other books. Nice to see how it is on the inside though. Some day I'll load it up, thanks to that restoration bit.
The TI99/4A was my first computer. You could change all characters in graphics using Hex codes (CALL CHAR). Still a star in Hex codes because of it. Filled entire graph books with 8*8 artworks. Now working in the PLC industry this knowledge is still valuable.
ah the memories...that was my first computer. Worked with it to learn basic, and then we got a TRS-80 Color Computer...I wrote a lot of basic games (text adventures) for myself and my friends to enjoy. Thanks for bringing all those days back to me. Good luck with the restoration of the floppy drive unit.
Great result! TBH I was half expecting to see the Sony in use as it's an extremely reliable tape deck (I can personally vouch for that model's performance), but I loved seeing the Sanyo because it's period correct. Can't wait to see how the floppy disk recovery goes.
My dad had one of those realistic cassette players he purchased for his trs-80 and his Trs-80 portable. It even had a pleather case. Just a cheap one for dust protection. I still remember those very small keys and playing my old bones and dodo McDonald’s happy meal tapes on it. It was so compact for the time😃
I wrote a lot of games back in the '80s on an Atari 800XL. Being stupid kids, we gave it all away in 1994. At the time it seemed like we had had it FOREVER ... a whopping 11yrs. And that was now 29yrs ago :-/ ... my brother and I still talk about those games, and I still remember the long cool summer nights, the endless rounds of coding and testing and revising.
Awesome. That was my very first computer that I purchased from JC Penney about 40 years ago (or so). I was just talking to someone about this and my Commodorc Vic 20 and then the Commodore 64. So cool this popped up today. 🙂
I had recovered all my oric and zx81 tapes with my CPC. Later when I transferred my amstrad disks to my PC, I was finally able to run all this in emulators 🥰
@@NoelsRetroLab I just made a routine in asm that read the k7 input like the CPC routine does. It must use the same type of signals. For the oric I had the format used by the rom and for the ZX81 I guessed the format.
Imagine restoring teenage boy's computer from today in 40 years, lol. "Billy, you know that old SSD you had in your laptop you just gave me? Well, I restored ALL the data and we're gonna look at it for the first time in my TH-cam video!" Billy: NOOOOOOoooooooooooooo!
I did the same with my first (unfinished) childhood game the other day. Transfered it from the CPC6128 disk to the PC 30 years later. I feel for the guy :-)
Just ran across this video and the tape brande brought me back. All my ZX81 programs are on the same type brand (they came in packs of 5 with different colors). So cool! Fond memories of programming on my friend's TI99!
Love this, so good of you and very entertaining to watch too! Have to admit that I'm a native British English speaker and it took me a few moments to decipher "Dogfight"! Thanks Noel, you are a star!
The Ozark Mountain Daredevils made some good music in their day. I remember drinking beer many an evening while listening to, "Jackie Blue" or "If You Wanna Get to Heaven". (Hey, this was in my mis-spent youth...) Standards for cassette recordings varied per country. Japan tended to record to a signal level of 0 db peak, whereas the US tended to record to -3db. Either level will work, but you may have to lower the gain on a 0db recording. Sanyo made good gear, too, especially back then. Good work on the keyboard! Those can be tricky. Later keyboards made for the Ti99-4/A had bifurcated spring switches that were individually replaceable.
That was my first childhood computer as well, I was no more than maybe four years old. A couple of years later we replaced it with a Commodore and a 2600. Still remember playing hunt the wumpus, munchman etc.
I had one of these as my first computer as a kid. Loved Parsec and Alpiner. Also Hunt the Wumpus, "TI" Invaders, Tombstone and probably loads of others I've forgotten.
The TI-99 puts 12 V on the line the C64 uses for luma, so don't use an S-Video or the Luma connection on a 1702 or similar since the 12 V can damage the monitor. The key switches on that keyboard are an early type made by Hi-Tek. They have a weakness where the white square plastic plungers break in some or all of the 4 corners so that they can't retain the keycaps. The sides also splay out and get stuck in their sockets. I have a PET and and Heathkit terminal using the same keyswitches and they all have loose keycaps or sticking keys because of this. TI-99/4As are the only source for period replacement of these plungers that I've found (although TI used several different kind of keyboards, so it's a gamble when buying one that you'll get a Hi-Tek keyboard.) I'm working on a 3D printed replacement, but I haven't got anything to work satisfactorily yet.
Good point about the s-video cable! Interesting about the white plastic. I must have been lucky with this one because they're all in perfect condition as far as I can tell, but yeah, having a 3D-printed replacement would be awesome.
Oh the memories! TI-99/4A was the first computer I got when I was a kid and since I couldn't be one of the k3WL kids who had Apple //s and tons of games, I spent all summer vacation playing around with the BASIC programming manual that came with it. Another fun thing was typing in the programs from computer gaming magazines. I guess everything turned out ok though because when I took a BASIC class that following school year, I became a teachers aid for the class because I knew more than the teacher.
I had a TI994A and still do, but when I was young we had a cassette based game called Tunnels of Doom that took close to 30 minutes to load, and failure was pretty high - esp. if batteries were low. I was able to hook mine to a modern LCD TV by connecting to modulator to antenna adapter for cable connections. I kind-of lucked into it, but your video quality looks better. 👍🏻
This was fantastic, Noel. My childhood machine was also a TI-99/4A with PEB, Speech, etc. Wrote many XB games for it. No idea what happened to it though. 😥
just got myself a TI 99+4 like that and i was happy to find it has the alps key switches just like my trs 80 model 3. my apple iie enhanced has another brand but still mechanical. they all feel nice.
That was my first computer and tape drive. I got it for xmas when I was around 10 years old and before xmas I found it and took it apart. After I got it apart and then had to put it all back together and put it back in the hiding spot. It worked fine after xmas, lol. The tape drive was a pain in the butt.
Restoring and collecting makes for a good Video, but inviting the previous owner to share some memories of the Device really does it for me, I love it!
It's great fun finding old tapes and trying to load them back in - I found two of my old c90 tapes, one for the Spectrum, one for the Electron - my very first program written on the Spectrum on boxing day of 1983 was still intact (used simple line drawing commands to draw a representation of Airwolf). A few machine code routines from magazine type-ins were still on there too along with some badly drawn graphic screens that I had saved. I also recovered some of my Electron code and was able to load it back on to a real Electron that I had just purchased a few months ago. I also used Audacity, along with a cheap £9 usb powered tape player to get the data recorded into a laptop, which then played back direct to the computers after some volume tweaking and filtering. Huge nostalgia hit!
Hi Noel, thanks for the nostalgia trip. I use Macs now. When I had the TI 99 4A, I was taking a "Computer Concepts" course, which used an IBM 360, in Blue. Dot matrix printer. BASIC. I also learned TI 99 4A BASIC version! Sweet!
The TI 99 4A had the booklets, some software, I loved "The Attack", "Parsec" and "Frogger" and "QBert" and learned BASIC programming! I aslo used the cassette recorder.
Amazing ! I had the exact same machine, speech synthesizer and the TI tape recorder! I also owned the Parsec and Alpiner games so this was a great flaahback for me !
There might be a digital copy of that tape online, somewhere. A lot of old 8-bit computers have online archives going back to the 80s. It might be possible to recreate a good copy of that program by copying the digital data onto a new cassette tape.
UK computer enthusiasts discovered the same thing as John - cheap tape players work way better than more expensive ones. UK department store Boots bought thousands of new old stock 1960s dictation cassette playback machines to sell alongside the ZX Spectrum and they were noted for their reliability. They were literally the cheapest tape playback machine boots could find. Alan Sugar then found who made the cheapest mono tape mechanisms in Japan and got them even cheaper than that by ordering them in bulk to add into the CPC464 model.
This was also my childhood computer when my father bought it new in the mid or late eighties and it cost a fortune and me and my brother did some BASIC coding on it but we never owned a cartridge or anything so the games i played on it were on the level as those Tiger handheld games from the same era
This was fascinating, audio data storage is an interest of mine. Shame about that volume dip in that recording. I think it may be recoverable but would be a lot of work.
Instead of using old home computer-style tape decks where the basic tape transport mechanism can damage the tape, it might be safer to use a walkman or hifi system tape deck where the tape transport mechanism is way more regulated (with useable drive belts of course). And even if this kind of tape deck works in stereo, you can switch the recording you make on the computer back to mono afterwards. I also recommend to use a manual audio cassette tape rewinder (you can directly feel the effort put into the rewinding with the hand that's moving the crank, so you can stop it before breaking the tape and open the cassette in order to fix it) like the ones that were made by Radio Shack to give the tape a full back and forth rewind, it will properly align the tape into the cassette before using it in the tape deck. I used an Aiwa HS-GMX50 to transfer a 35+ Y/O Agfa C-120 cassettte tape content to record it, and the uncompressed audio files (WAV 44.1 Khz 16 bit mono) were perfectly recognized as programs on my Sharp PC-1350. If you don't have an SVI Cache you can also use either the computer where the WAV file is or copy it on a smartphone (or even a WAV compatible MP3 player) to connect it to the target computer tape interface. Most of the time, the stereo audio out doesn't interfere in the transfer. For the damaged audio section of the second program (it looks like a "simple" ampltude level problem to me), it could be interesting to zoom on this section, then manually modify the output volume of every subsection (since it goes down, then up) in order for the waveform of this section to look more like the rest of the whole audio file. If it still doesn't work, you can try to apply passband filters. And of course keep the original audio anyway.
Im 51yo . The Ti99/4A was my 1st computer. wish i had it now.Think i only had buck rogers as the game and got a magazine with basic programs occasionally ,, i lived in the middle of nowhere
my first computer was A TI-99 4A also. I had the extended basic cartridge,and the speech synthesizer. but not the memory expansion / Floppy Disk drive. I spent hours writing programs for it. I miss it 😪 but now I code with Liberty Basic. which works on a modern windows computer.
Audacity is such an amazing piece of free software, man. It's so flexible, is capable of so much and it just WORKS. I've used it for a thousand purposes. Puts a lot of paid software to shame imho.
Thanks for sharing this! I always enjoy a TI99 video as this was my first PC as well and yours are always top notch. Really would like to see you get into the expansion box, that was but a dream when I was kid. Even now you don't see all that much of them on YT.
@@NoelsRetroLab hopefully it has a non-TI double density floppy controller. There's a funny line in the manual for TI's single density controller, in the part about external drives and the card edge connector. "You can break off this tab, then you can throw away the card.". I remember laughing loudly for quite a while when I read that back in the 1980's. That's up there with some old 1970's IBM manual that included the line "Do not use hammer." in the section on reassembling the computer after installing an upgrade.
Great job! And the TI with NTSC is a nice companion for the PAL one. ;-) I'm envious that you've got the original PEB now! Great fun watching a new video, I wished you would make videos more often though,
Your contact's statement about cheap tape decks working better than expensive ones is supported by the Timex Sinclair 1000 user manual. I'm hoping to put this to the test once I've finished repairing my Sony hi-fi deck. Right now, I have a Panasonic shoebox deck from the 2000s which doesn't work too well, and a Timex Sinclair cassette player that does the job when volume and tone are around 7-9.
I cannot tell you how many unfinished BASIC games I had on cassette tapes back in my Commodore 64 days. Sadly, the last time I tried to load some of them on my old C64 in my parent's attic about half of them were corrupted. But that's kind of to be expected with cassette tape or just about any magnetic media storage.
The Memory full error may be the result of loading a TI BASIC program into Extended BASIC. Judging by the partial listing you showed this is a TI BASIC game rather than Extended BASIC. The available RAM in Extended BASIC is slightly smaller because part of the RAM is used to keep sprite data (there are other incompatibilities, like some character sets that are not available but these result in other errors rather than Memory Full).
Doh! So that was the opposite problem than I had with the other one. Hahaha... I wish they had added a version number to the BASIC listing and printed an error if it didn't match. It would have been one more byte!! 😃 Thanks. I'll have to try it again.
Wow... You deal with things so different than me. I would have just stuck the tape in a tape drive and loaded that sucker. Spoiled by the really reliable C64 Dataset, but my tapes from 1981 (VIC-20) and my C64 tapes have had about a 99% success rate for being read.
In 1986, Farmers Trading Company put out a line of computors that ran Basic, programs could be saved on tape. $1500. Okay. So I applied for an FTC card. It took too long and I went off the idea. Basic was still the best way to go for me though. A few years later, Playstation brought Basic on their PS2. Brilliant. I haven't stopped since. Especially when a progammer transferred for use for the PC. His version is better than an official version.
You could try using a compressor to restore the dip of the destroyed signal. However this sounds like the higher frequencies have disappeared also... Maybe a spectral repair program like RX or SpectraLayers could help restoring the signal.
I still have my Ti-99A NTSC no data cassette a bunch of cassettes, 2 joysticks, speech synth and a few keyboard overlays, lets take it out again for a spin
Wow. I thought I was watching someone with 1,000,000+ subscribers. Pretty shocking to see you only have 48.7K, especially with quality content like this. Keep up the good work!
The volume dip or data corruption is a typical problem with old tapes when not rewound completely. Otherwise they can be fine even after decades. Also cassettes certified for data (tested for no oxide dropout) where better in the long run.
Thanks for this new video Noel!. It's an incredible sensation when you are able to preserve your own (or in this case your neighbour's) old programs. Good work!! Glad to confirm that you didn't had to deal again with the TMS9929 and the smd board to get the RGB signal we used in the past (just a heads-up: nowadays we have the great evolution named "TMS-RGB" from Nicholas Piegdon). In regards of tape images for Ti-99/4A it would be great to have a fraction of the utilities for the Speccy. It would be awesome too to have some tape format supported on the FinalGrom99. Cheers from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean 😊
He specifically asked to see it working as a condition of giving it to you, and even without that condition you have invited him to see it. Either way he knows why he is going there so it's not a surprise!
To try everything Brilliant has to offer-free-for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/NoelsRetroLab/ . The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription.
I love the way it starts up almost instantly.
There should be more restoration stories with a human element like this... great stuff.
You can bake the tape slightly. Thats how they make the material adhere back to the plastic. Always with tape you keep the high at 2+ and you will get good results. Also you can still buy shells you can move the tape into. Ive noticed the spindles on older tape shells can be very heavy. Hope i helped. I have been making audio tape collages for 20 years. So im not a scientist but i know tape. Lol.
Noel, I would love to see you repairing an old tape recorder.
Cool! You're not the first one to say that, so I'll probably sneak it in at some point.
Great idea! I haven't seen any retro channel try it before.
@@NoelsRetroLab I think it's crucial for you to look into "tape baking" process for cases like that.
@@NoelsRetroLab Also I'd say for valuable tapes like this one checking if the magnetic layer is sticky is a must before even attempting to put it into a deck. And if it is you should bake it first. And yes, the "damage" isn't really a damage, just that part of the tape absorbed water vapour throughout the ages and sticks to the heads/loses particles because of that. Tape baking is the process of drying the tape in controlled conditions. It's pretty easy to do.
@@andrewdunbar828 Usually the culpit is rubber drive bands that go bad, which there is a lot of videos of. But by all means, one more doesn't hurt.
I can see two ways of recovering the data from the volume dipped portion of the recording. The simple way is to add gain to the section of audio with the dip, which can be done right in Audacity. It does not have to be perfect but you can't raise the gain so much that it would peak; it just has to be loud enough for the signal highs and lows to be detected past a threshold.
The second way is how we did it back in the 1980's - throw the source cassette into the left side of your hi-fi stereo system, throw a blank cassette into the right side, bump up the EQ a few decibels across all frequency ranges, hit record on the right side, play on the left side, and enjoy some of the weirdest progressive jams you have ever heard while it transfers the data to the new cassette. Even though it is data, it is still technically audio and therefore you can manipulate it the same way as audio.
If you can't fix a wobbly sound file by processing it, say the frequency is inconsistent due to tape stretch, it's really fun writing some code to interpret the sound file, It's mostly about counting zero crossings but can take some fiddling and tuning to get right.
Most tape formats I played from had little to know error checking. I guess some has a very basic checksum. The exception was the C64, which had a very overengineered format which is why C64 tape loading and saving is so ridiculously slower that other systems of the era.
Great video Noel. I recently fired up my Amstrad CPC 464 from 1985 and tried loading programs from multiple cassettes that I had back in the day.
To my surprise 90% of the cassettes loaded fine.
Awesome! I got a little bit emotionally moved, remembering how was my first time recovering games from my childhood and play them again many years later. That were my first steps in retrogaming, and I never stopped since then.
For the data recovery part, using a sound card that has a LINE-IN input would be preferable to a microphone input, to avoid the eventual filters and amplifiers of the mic input.
And also, trying to have the volume as high as possible for recording (like ~80%) without it being saturated/clamped.
OMG ! An "Elephants never forget" floppy. I used to love those...well at least I loved the ads in magazines, as I never had a disk drive at the time for my Sinclair ZX Spectrum =)
Ha yeah, I'd have totally forgotten about that brand, until the logo appeared!
Had some on the bbc we had :)
Excellent episode. Nice mix of a restoration along with some data recovery. Restoring an old cassette recorder would be great.
This guy John was an absolute legend. He wanted his childhood TI to find the best home possible.
Hey Noel, so I've recovered exactly things like that, with low volume, you had. If you zoom in all the way in audacity you'll be able to see a pattern. For the ZX81 it's something like short and long repeating pulses (3 vs 7 maybe if I remember). So if you can glean what each section should have been (i.e. you can usually still see how long each pattern was) you can just copy a good 1 or 0 (3 vs 7 pulses from the proper volume level) in the place of the bad (low volume) sections. As long as you don't add in too much of time difference, it doesn't have to align exactly, it should be fine. Worked a treat.
I played around a bit doing that, but didn't spend much time. Maybe being really careful about when to zoom in would help. I ended up posting the wavs in the Discord channel because multiple people wanted to try restoring it 😃
@@NoelsRetroLab Did anyone manage to restore it in the end?
Yes. Stay tuned a few more days.
Noel, I had an old Sinclair Spectrum game on tape that went quiet in one part. I put it in Audacity went bonkers with the amplify till the quiet part was 100% and yes it clipped. I played it into the Spectrum first time after 35 years. I made a CD with the WAV file. I later found out the spectrum just counted the pulses on the tape. As long as the tape recorder amplifier does not distort you should be fine rescuing games. I hope that helps.
Nice! I did mess with that a bit, but not for very long. So maybe it's possible to do that as well. I put the wav files in the Discord channel since some people wanted to mess with them to try to do that same thing. Good to know it can work!
The keyboard looks to be the way the BBC Micro did it’s keys - you could thump them and the key mechanism was basically unaffected since it wasn’t the pressure of the key push that directly closed the contacts.
Good luck with the floppy recovery! Your work with the tape recovery was really impressive!
Thank you! I'll be my first time doing a deep recovery of a floppy, so that should be fun.
Sanyo products used to be very reliable, so it doesn't surprise me it ended up being the best tape deck for your purposes 😁. Can't speak for anything more modern though.
Yeah, pretty amazing that I didn't even have to change the drive belt. They don't make them like the used to!
through audio editing i believe it's not really hard to restore that faulty area of the tape, i'm used to that kind of stuff in sound design and restoration, you can start by trying to just normalize the volume applying the "inverse" curve carefully... there are many ways, and it would be very useful to understand what's supposed to be the right wafeform for 1's and zeros ...
as a youngster, i get the feeling of nostalgia for things i experienced not many years ago. How nice it must have been to bring back memories from more than three decades ago. love it
Just to spread some knowledge, the type of key switches in the keyboard are of the stackpole variety. I would really like to see the PEB (Peripheral Expansion Box (the box with the disk drive)) up and running with John's game.
Great video! I donated my old ZX Spectrum to my friend along with a C90 full of programs I typed in from magazines - including a couple I wrote myself. He did the same and recovered the programs I wrote. It's such an intense nostalgia overload seeing something on the screen you wrote almost 40 years ago. It's quite moving.
Yes, please do a video on restoring the Cassette Tape Players.
When testing PSUs that aren't connected to anything, try putting the multimeter into AUTO-V LoZ. This will apply a small amount of load onto the device you are testing. So the power rails are not floating and giving weird or vague results.
If your testing voltage in circuit, then yes use the normal voltage modes.
That's really cool. I didn't know about that mode. I'll try it. Thanks!
I wasn't screaming, but I was mentally sending the message. Yeah, one of those guys who had everything your neighbour had. Synth, joysticks, PEB, _and_ a Radio Shack replacement keyboard -- the one sold back in around 86 or so.
The mental message arrived loud and clear to the past and that's how I figured it out 🤣 Seriously, I wish they had added some kind of check instead of just letting you load the wrong BASIC. Oh well. Lesson learned!
@@NoelsRetroLab Alternatively, one could read the tape label a little better next time... ;-)
Really interesting to see the process. That TI99 brings back some (very old) memories!
Man, my TI99/4A is still sitting in a box with the games, controllers and tape player/recorder. Haven't used it in forever. I even still have some of those same books, dug them up to go with my other books. Nice to see how it is on the inside though. Some day I'll load it up, thanks to that restoration bit.
What are you waiting for? Give it a try! 😃
Tape access anxiety is a real thing!
Oh boy, this brings me back... I had 3 copies of every program I made.
Yeah, it is isn't it? You just never know when it's going to stop working.
That TI-99 is such a beautiful machine and that Trinitron is clean. John really hooked you up! Great vid and look forward to seeing the next episode.
The TI99/4A was my first computer. You could change all characters in graphics using Hex codes (CALL CHAR). Still a star in Hex codes because of it. Filled entire graph books with 8*8 artworks. Now working in the PLC industry this knowledge is still valuable.
ah the memories...that was my first computer. Worked with it to learn basic, and then we got a TRS-80 Color Computer...I wrote a lot of basic games (text adventures) for myself and my friends to enjoy. Thanks for bringing all those days back to me. Good luck with the restoration of the floppy drive unit.
Great result! TBH I was half expecting to see the Sony in use as it's an extremely reliable tape deck (I can personally vouch for that model's performance), but I loved seeing the Sanyo because it's period correct. Can't wait to see how the floppy disk recovery goes.
Right. My head said the Sony. My heart said the Sanyo. Heart won 😃
My dad had one of those realistic cassette players he purchased for his trs-80 and his Trs-80 portable. It even had a pleather case. Just a cheap one for dust protection. I still remember those very small keys and playing my old bones and dodo McDonald’s happy meal tapes on it. It was so compact for the time😃
I wrote a lot of games back in the '80s on an Atari 800XL. Being stupid kids, we gave it all away in 1994. At the time it seemed like we had had it FOREVER ... a whopping 11yrs. And that was now 29yrs ago :-/ ... my brother and I still talk about those games, and I still remember the long cool summer nights, the endless rounds of coding and testing and revising.
Awesome. That was my very first computer that I purchased from JC Penney about 40 years ago (or so). I was just talking to someone about this and my Commodorc Vic 20 and then the Commodore 64. So cool this popped up today. 🙂
I had recovered all my oric and zx81 tapes with my CPC. Later when I transferred my amstrad disks to my PC, I was finally able to run all this in emulators 🥰
Interesting! How did you use the CPC to recover those tapes? Did you digitize them somehow?
@@NoelsRetroLab I just made a routine in asm that read the k7 input like the CPC routine does. It must use the same type of signals. For the oric I had the format used by the rom and for the ZX81 I guessed the format.
Imagine restoring teenage boy's computer from today in 40 years, lol.
"Billy, you know that old SSD you had in your laptop you just gave me? Well, I restored ALL the data and we're gonna look at it for the first time in my TH-cam video!"
Billy: NOOOOOOoooooooooooooo!
🤣🤣🤣
John! my first computer was a TI99!! hahaha! this is fantastic!! you have a great neighbor!!! :D:D:D -Cholly
Yes I do!
I did the same with my first (unfinished) childhood game the other day. Transfered it from the CPC6128 disk to the PC 30 years later. I feel for the guy :-)
Just ran across this video and the tape brande brought me back. All my ZX81 programs are on the same type brand (they came in packs of 5 with different colors). So cool! Fond memories of programming on my friend's TI99!
This man is overnecessarily good looking. wow.
Love this, so good of you and very entertaining to watch too! Have to admit that I'm a native British English speaker and it took me a few moments to decipher "Dogfight"!
Thanks Noel, you are a star!
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it!
The Ozark Mountain Daredevils made some good music in their day. I remember drinking beer many an evening while listening to, "Jackie Blue" or "If You Wanna Get to Heaven". (Hey, this was in my mis-spent youth...)
Standards for cassette recordings varied per country. Japan tended to record to a signal level of 0 db peak, whereas the US tended to record to -3db. Either level will work, but you may have to lower the gain on a 0db recording. Sanyo made good gear, too, especially back then.
Good work on the keyboard! Those can be tricky. Later keyboards made for the Ti99-4/A had bifurcated spring switches that were individually replaceable.
That was my first childhood computer as well, I was no more than maybe four years old. A couple of years later we replaced it with a Commodore and a 2600. Still remember playing hunt the wumpus, munchman etc.
I had one of these as my first computer as a kid. Loved Parsec and Alpiner. Also Hunt the Wumpus, "TI" Invaders, Tombstone and probably loads of others I've forgotten.
The TI-99 puts 12 V on the line the C64 uses for luma, so don't use an S-Video or the Luma connection on a 1702 or similar since the 12 V can damage the monitor.
The key switches on that keyboard are an early type made by Hi-Tek. They have a weakness where the white square plastic plungers break in some or all of the 4 corners so that they can't retain the keycaps. The sides also splay out and get stuck in their sockets. I have a PET and and Heathkit terminal using the same keyswitches and they all have loose keycaps or sticking keys because of this. TI-99/4As are the only source for period replacement of these plungers that I've found (although TI used several different kind of keyboards, so it's a gamble when buying one that you'll get a Hi-Tek keyboard.) I'm working on a 3D printed replacement, but I haven't got anything to work satisfactorily yet.
Good point about the s-video cable! Interesting about the white plastic. I must have been lucky with this one because they're all in perfect condition as far as I can tell, but yeah, having a 3D-printed replacement would be awesome.
Oh the memories! TI-99/4A was the first computer I got when I was a kid and since I couldn't be one of the k3WL kids who had Apple //s and tons of games, I spent all summer vacation playing around with the BASIC programming manual that came with it. Another fun thing was typing in the programs from computer gaming magazines. I guess everything turned out ok though because when I took a BASIC class that following school year, I became a teachers aid for the class because I knew more than the teacher.
Yeah, sure about the tape player repair videos ! That's always interesting !
I still have the 99/4A my dad bought in 1983, proudly on display in my 'mancave'. Sadly the Trinitron TV died some years ago..
I was shouting at the screen "you need to plug in an extended BASIC cartridge". Glad to find out you heard me
I had a TI994A and still do, but when I was young we had a cassette based game called Tunnels of Doom that took close to 30 minutes to load, and failure was pretty high - esp. if batteries were low. I was able to hook mine to a modern LCD TV by connecting to modulator to antenna adapter for cable connections. I kind-of lucked into it, but your video quality looks better. 👍🏻
This was fantastic, Noel. My childhood machine was also a TI-99/4A with PEB, Speech, etc. Wrote many XB games for it. No idea what happened to it though. 😥
just got myself a TI 99+4 like that and i was happy to find it has the alps key switches just like my trs 80 model 3. my apple iie enhanced has another brand but still mechanical. they all feel nice.
That was my first computer and tape drive. I got it for xmas when I was around 10 years old and before xmas I found it and took it apart.
After I got it apart and then had to put it all back together and put it back in the hiding spot. It worked fine after xmas, lol. The tape drive was a pain in the butt.
Restoring and collecting makes for a good Video, but inviting the previous owner to share some memories of the Device really does it for me, I love it!
It's great fun finding old tapes and trying to load them back in - I found two of my old c90 tapes, one for the Spectrum, one for the Electron - my very first program written on the Spectrum on boxing day of 1983 was still intact (used simple line drawing commands to draw a representation of Airwolf). A few machine code routines from magazine type-ins were still on there too along with some badly drawn graphic screens that I had saved. I also recovered some of my Electron code and was able to load it back on to a real Electron that I had just purchased a few months ago. I also used Audacity, along with a cheap £9 usb powered tape player to get the data recorded into a laptop, which then played back direct to the computers after some volume tweaking and filtering. Huge nostalgia hit!
Hi Noel, thanks for the nostalgia trip. I use Macs now. When I had the TI 99 4A, I was taking a "Computer Concepts" course, which used an IBM 360, in Blue. Dot matrix printer. BASIC. I also learned TI 99 4A BASIC version! Sweet!
The TI 99 4A had the booklets, some software, I loved "The Attack", "Parsec" and "Frogger" and "QBert" and learned BASIC programming! I aslo used the cassette recorder.
16 K, in color, great sound, BASIC programming, cool!
Amazing ! I had the exact same machine, speech synthesizer and the TI tape recorder! I also owned the Parsec and Alpiner games so this was a great flaahback for me !
There might be a digital copy of that tape online, somewhere. A lot of old 8-bit computers have online archives going back to the 80s.
It might be possible to recreate a good copy of that program by copying the digital data onto a new cassette tape.
UK computer enthusiasts discovered the same thing as John - cheap tape players work way better than more expensive ones. UK department store Boots bought thousands of new old stock 1960s dictation cassette playback machines to sell alongside the ZX Spectrum and they were noted for their reliability. They were literally the cheapest tape playback machine boots could find. Alan Sugar then found who made the cheapest mono tape mechanisms in Japan and got them even cheaper than that by ordering them in bulk to add into the CPC464 model.
That's such a nice idea. Kudos to you!
Man, that Funky Stars at 6:08 !! So many nice memories, even if it's not from the CPC era for me.
Nice job. It's so hard backing up old cassettes onto modern computers. They seem to amplify tape hiss and exaggerate drop-out.
This was also my childhood computer when my father bought it new in the mid or late eighties and it cost a fortune and me and my brother did some BASIC coding on it but we never owned a cartridge or anything so the games i played on it were on the level as those Tiger handheld games from the same era
This was fascinating, audio data storage is an interest of mine. Shame about that volume dip in that recording. I think it may be recoverable but would be a lot of work.
Its so heart harming watch the man nostalgia seeing his childhood games:)
great video Noel ! and i love the chicken train section, so funny ! and even better, an Amstrad CPC 6128 to help with the rescue
Of course! Any time I need a third computer to do something else... chances are I'm going to lean on an Amstrad 😃
Instead of using old home computer-style tape decks where the basic tape transport mechanism can damage the tape, it might be safer to use a walkman or hifi system tape deck where the tape transport mechanism is way more regulated (with useable drive belts of course). And even if this kind of tape deck works in stereo, you can switch the recording you make on the computer back to mono afterwards.
I also recommend to use a manual audio cassette tape rewinder (you can directly feel the effort put into the rewinding with the hand that's moving the crank, so you can stop it before breaking the tape and open the cassette in order to fix it) like the ones that were made by Radio Shack to give the tape a full back and forth rewind, it will properly align the tape into the cassette before using it in the tape deck.
I used an Aiwa HS-GMX50 to transfer a 35+ Y/O Agfa C-120 cassettte tape content to record it, and the uncompressed audio files (WAV 44.1 Khz 16 bit mono) were perfectly recognized as programs on my Sharp PC-1350.
If you don't have an SVI Cache you can also use either the computer where the WAV file is or copy it on a smartphone (or even a WAV compatible MP3 player) to connect it to the target computer tape interface. Most of the time, the stereo audio out doesn't interfere in the transfer.
For the damaged audio section of the second program (it looks like a "simple" ampltude level problem to me), it could be interesting to zoom on this section, then manually modify the output volume of every subsection (since it goes down, then up) in order for the waveform of this section to look more like the rest of the whole audio file. If it still doesn't work, you can try to apply passband filters. And of course keep the original audio anyway.
Im 51yo . The Ti99/4A was my 1st computer. wish i had it now.Think i only had buck rogers as the game and got a magazine with basic programs occasionally ,, i lived in the middle of nowhere
my first computer was A TI-99 4A also. I had the extended basic cartridge,and the speech synthesizer.
but not the memory expansion / Floppy Disk drive. I spent hours writing programs for it. I miss it 😪
but now I code with Liberty Basic. which works on a modern windows computer.
Oh gosh, the _memories_ this brought back!
That corrupted tape file looks very recoverable actually.
Probably. I posted the wav in the Discord channel in case anyone is interested in playing with it.
Audacity is such an amazing piece of free software, man. It's so flexible, is capable of so much and it just WORKS. I've used it for a thousand purposes. Puts a lot of paid software to shame imho.
Very, very true!
Thanks for sharing this! I always enjoy a TI99 video as this was my first PC as well and yours are always top notch. Really would like to see you get into the expansion box, that was but a dream when I was kid. Even now you don't see all that much of them on YT.
Thanks! I'll definitely do a followup video with the expansion box. Seems like a super cool accessory!
@@NoelsRetroLab hopefully it has a non-TI double density floppy controller. There's a funny line in the manual for TI's single density controller, in the part about external drives and the card edge connector. "You can break off this tab, then you can throw away the card.". I remember laughing loudly for quite a while when I read that back in the 1980's. That's up there with some old 1970's IBM manual that included the line "Do not use hammer." in the section on reassembling the computer after installing an upgrade.
Great job! And the TI with NTSC is a nice companion for the PAL one. ;-) I'm envious that you've got the original PEB now! Great fun watching a new video, I wished you would make videos more often though,
Thanks! Yeah, I wish I could make videos more often too 😃 Next year I'm hoping to devote more time to this. We'll see.
Damn, John! Your Boy hooked it Up!
Thats awesome!
_This_ is what it should all be about! *Bringing back happy, geeky memories.*
Yes, I’d also love to see you restore those two Radio Shack cassette recorders, please.
Your contact's statement about cheap tape decks working better than expensive ones is supported by the Timex Sinclair 1000 user manual. I'm hoping to put this to the test once I've finished repairing my Sony hi-fi deck. Right now, I have a Panasonic shoebox deck from the 2000s which doesn't work too well, and a Timex Sinclair cassette player that does the job when volume and tone are around 7-9.
The Amiga 500 "Space Invaders keyboard" has a similar mechanism. The only difference is that it has 3 metal elements in each side.
Interesting! I wasn't familiar with that keyboard type on the Amiga. The contacts look much smaller, but same principle. Neat!
I cannot tell you how many unfinished BASIC games I had on cassette tapes back in my Commodore 64 days. Sadly, the last time I tried to load some of them on my old C64 in my parent's attic about half of them were corrupted. But that's kind of to be expected with cassette tape or just about any magnetic media storage.
An awesome video as always. This brings back memories of my TI-99/4A and some of the basic I learned.
The Memory full error may be the result of loading a TI BASIC program into Extended BASIC. Judging by the partial listing you showed this is a TI BASIC game rather than Extended BASIC. The available RAM in Extended BASIC is slightly smaller because part of the RAM is used to keep sprite data (there are other incompatibilities, like some character sets that are not available but these result in other errors rather than Memory Full).
Doh! So that was the opposite problem than I had with the other one. Hahaha... I wish they had added a version number to the BASIC listing and printed an error if it didn't match. It would have been one more byte!! 😃 Thanks. I'll have to try it again.
It also looked like the computer came with the PEB and so it is very possible that there is a 32K memory expansion card inside.
@@tedthrasher9433 This is also true, although if it is TI BASIC (as it looks) rather than Extended, it cannot take advantage of the memory expansion.
Wow... You deal with things so different than me. I would have just stuck the tape in a tape drive and loaded that sucker. Spoiled by the really reliable C64 Dataset, but my tapes from 1981 (VIC-20) and my C64 tapes have had about a 99% success rate for being read.
In 1986, Farmers Trading Company put out a line of computors that ran Basic, programs could be saved on tape.
$1500. Okay. So I applied for an FTC card. It took too long and I went off the idea.
Basic was still the best way to go for me though. A few years later, Playstation brought Basic on their PS2. Brilliant.
I haven't stopped since. Especially when a progammer transferred for use for the PC. His version is better than an official version.
When i was 9 years old...i became a master at fixing broken cassettes. Miss those days
You could try using a compressor to restore the dip of the destroyed signal. However this sounds like the higher frequencies have disappeared also... Maybe a spectral repair program like RX or SpectraLayers could help restoring the signal.
Wonderful Noel, great job!!! Hope to see you working on those Floppy Disks soon :-) Greetings, Michael
Thank you! Yes, looking forward to some floppy disk archaeology now!
I still have my Ti-99A NTSC no data cassette a bunch of cassettes, 2 joysticks, speech synth and a few keyboard overlays, lets take it out again for a spin
Wow. I thought I was watching someone with 1,000,000+ subscribers. Pretty shocking to see you only have 48.7K, especially with quality content like this. Keep up the good work!
Thank you! I really appreciate the comment! 😃
I had Cauldron on my colour CPC 464 - loved that game 🙂
I definitely want to see a Radio Shack tape recorder repair video.
Yes, please repair the Radio Shack ones, I used to own the black one.
you are so nice,. and how lucky to have you as a "wouldn't you like to be my" Neighbor? lol,nice!
The volume dip or data corruption is a typical problem with old tapes when not rewound completely. Otherwise they can be fine even after decades. Also cassettes certified for data (tested for no oxide dropout) where better in the long run.
Wow, I had a powerful dose of nostalgia when I saw that elephant memory logo
Thanks for this new video Noel!. It's an incredible sensation when you are able to preserve your own (or in this case your neighbour's) old programs. Good work!!
Glad to confirm that you didn't had to deal again with the TMS9929 and the smd board to get the RGB signal we used in the past (just a heads-up: nowadays we have the great evolution named "TMS-RGB" from Nicholas Piegdon).
In regards of tape images for Ti-99/4A it would be great to have a fraction of the utilities for the Speccy. It would be awesome too to have some tape format supported on the FinalGrom99.
Cheers from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean 😊
He specifically asked to see it working as a condition of giving it to you, and even without that condition you have invited him to see it. Either way he knows why he is going there so it's not a surprise!
Restoration vids of folks old computers are the best restoration vids
TI99/4a was my first home micro in the UK, before getting my beloved CPC464 .... would love to get another PAL TI99/4a... and my CPC464 fixed!