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Tiny USB‑C Microcassette Datasette Revives C64 Tape Loads at 500 bps

The proof-of-concept demonstrates a USB-linked tape deck others can replicate from the published code.

Overview

  • Creator Bitluni rebuilt a Commodore-style deck around an Olympus microcassette transport with a custom PCB featuring a DAC, op-amps and a USB‑C port.
  • Data moves via square‑wave FSK tuned to about 1,000 Hz, enabling real‑time decoding on a microcontroller.
  • The working setup reaches roughly 500 bits per second, yielding about 1 MB per 60‑minute tape with transfers that take an hour.
  • Reliability improved by splitting data into 512‑byte blocks and writing each block twice with a checksum fallback.
  • A demo successfully loaded an 8 KB Pac‑Man over USB, the code is on GitHub, and the maker intends to present the deck as a USB mass‑storage device.