Embedded Microcontroller |
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You can use your vintage computer to read the data stored on the cassette tape, unless you no longer have the computer, or in my case the Kansas City tape interface appears to be broken, as I only can get gibberish out of it.
David Beazley has written a free program "kcs_decode.py" in Python3 which allows you to recover the data from a Kansas City encoded cassette tape. I use a free program Audacity to record the cassette tape contents to my computer. You need to connect the output of a vintage cassette player to the line input on your computer. Press record on Audacity and Play on the cassette player. After a minute or two, you will have an audio file containing your program. |
The tapes that I am decoding come from an Ohio Scientific C1P superboard computer. The analog waveform that is on the cassette is a string of tones, either 1200Hz for a zero or 2400 Hz for a one. At 300 Baud, there are 4 cycles of 1200Hz which make up a zero bit and 8 cycles of 2400Hz which make a single one bit. The serial stream for a complete byte is start bit, 8 data bits, 2 stop bits.
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