eBay alert: 29 various C1 Cassettes

[Steve Gray]

Ebay auction# 170906684970
29 OSI C1 cassette tapes. A mix of OSI and Aardvark software plus some homebrew.

Would be nice to have archived. I think the price is a little high, but you can make an offer. I have purchased from this seller before and he seems to be reasonable.

Steve

[nama]

The cassettes I recently archived I purchased from this seller, but not through ebay. The sale was private.
I'm not sure where he keeps finding all this stuff.

Maybe we can all chip in to buy them as a group so that we can archive them?

[dave]

I went ahead and made an offer on the cassettes. I'm still waiting for a copy of FBASIC, FORTH, or one of those rare really cool OSI programs to come up.

[nama]

That's great Dave. Was your offer accepted?

[dave]

Yes, we will see if there's anything really interesting in there. . .

[nama]

There seems to be some interesting stuff there (although not the elusive FBASIC and FORTH), Great to see that you were able to get them at a decent price.

(Ohio Scientific software)
Hide & seek,
Modem routine,
Bomber
Luner Lander
Breakout
Series II video swap
Destroyer
SCX-102 C1P Sampler

(Aardvark)
Cursor II
Monster Maze
RTTY
C1 Galaxy

(Homemade tapes)
Othelo
Tanklator
Chess
Assorted
calendar
Star Trek
bang
asteroids
battlestar
extended monitor
Star Wars
Escape from Mars

If you need some help converting a few, I can certainly help. I'm hoping the conversion process will be easier/quicker than what I previously experienced.
I have already converted 'Escape from Mars' so I'm wondering if it's the same version or different.

Phil

[dave]

Looks like I received the tapes--they were waiting for me when I stopped by home (which is under construction and not-quite-livable at the moment). I was going to list the inventory, but you got most of it already. In addition, the following home-made tapes:

Zulu9
Entrapment
Depth Charge
Tanklator (?)
IBM (?)
FS Editor (Full Screen editor?)
Wumpus

Plus some mystery tapes. I had been planning to just read these in to the C2 and then list them to the PC, but it may be easier to just play them into the PC. In that case, Phil, I'll be taking a look at your email describing your process.

Dave

[nama]

Great that they arrived safely.

From previous experience I think it is best that the first thing to do is make digital .wav files from the cassettes. If the tapes degrade further due to repeated playing then you know that there is at least one decent digital backup. I use the free program called Audacity for copying all my tapes, and it works very well indeed and has many options for filtering. You can then export the files as .wav.

One thing to be careful of is I noticed that playing these old cassettes quickly dirtied the head on the player, and I had to clean it a few times during the process of reading a batch of cassettes. If I didn't the quality quickly deteriorated into something totally unusable. Another issue I came across was that the felt part on the cassettes (just below the area where the head contacts) often fall off due to the glue getting old. usually the felt part is still floating around in the cassette case and it was fairly simple to re-glue them back on. Finally sometimes the tapes would not roll smoothly when playing back and this would result in varying tape speeds. Usually a rapping of the cassette on the table or a slight twisting of the cassette would free things up.

As I mentioned previously the process I went through for converting the cassettes was tedious, and it may be easier to load them into the C2 and list the data out to the PC. The process I went through was to get different reads from different samples and then manually splice all the parts together until I hoped I had assembled a complete and error free listing. At the very least the listing from the C2 may offer another way to get a sample, at best it may just work right away.

Phil