Did you know that there’s a way to “listen” to a Datasette Drive, even though it’s not meant to play back the latest top twenty mixtapes?
I’ve recently acquired a Commodore Plus/4 with 1531 Datasette. I remember having one of those in the eighties (with an adaptor to connect it to my C64 back then).
The datasette is misbehaving, allegedly saving programmes but never loading them back in. Power is working fine, but as I no longer have a “cassette player” as such, I have no idea if it’s actually recording anything on the tape, or hearing what’s on it.
I needed a way to playback the tape when I found this super short and very useful machine code snippet:
0600 LDA $01 0602 ADC #$38 0604 STA $FF11 0607 STA $FF19 060A JMP $0600
When started with SYS 1536 the outer border of the Plus/4 will change according to what’s coming from the tape when you press play, and audio is quasi-modulated to the speaker output. It sounds rather distorted, but nevertheless you can hear what’s on the tape!
To enter the programme, first type MONITOR which will take your out of BASIC and into the machine language monitor. Then type A 0600 followed by the first command (LDA $01). Now TEDMON will give you the next hex address, so just type the next command.
When you’re done hit return, then type X (and return) to exit to BASIC. Here you can start the programme with SYS 1536, then PRESS PLAY ON TAPE. Enjoy!
Note that this will not work on the C64, but you can hunt around for several “tape alignment” programmes which will work with similar principles – but I couldn’t find one for the Plus/4.
Thanks for Marton for the code:
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