Using a Generic Tape Recorder as an Atari Cassette Drive?

JoeShmoe950 asks: "I recently got my hands on an Atari 65XE. It didn't come with a floppy or a cassette drive. I started programming when I realized there was no way to save my program. I wanted to ask you people if there is any way to wire up a normal cassette recorder to an Atari. What I need is the description for what part of a tape recorder(record, mic, speaker, etc) to each pin. I want to create an alternative to buying an Atari Cassette Drive from eBay."

Comments

What's your sound card for?

[DrSkwid]

Cassette!!! I mean, come on, I had to use cassette 20 years ago (I still have some tapes)

they degrade faster than floppies

Atari 410 and it's ilk

[Craig Maloney]

The venerable 410 and its successors used a 13 pin Atari-specific interface called SIO (Serial Input/Output), just like every other Atari-specific device. It's a little trickier than just feeding in a standard cassette recorder input/output like the other computers. Plus the Atari tapes could feed in sound from the other track of the tape (which made load times mre berable). As an Atari owner, I was glad when I didn't have to load things from tape anymore, and pretty much abandoned tape when i got my disk drive. You might want to find a 1050 or XF551 and use that rather than attempt to retrofit a standard cassette tape to the Atari. Or if you want, find a broken Atari tape drive and study it. I think you'll find there's more going on there than you realize.

Good luck with whatever you decide, and welcome to the world of Atari.

Speaking of which, I haven't played Atari today. Need to get it out and rectify that

Re:Atari

[The Lynxpro]

Its called the SIO Port (Serial Input Output Interface). It wasn't weird; it was brilliant. The Atari employee who created it now works for Intel. And coincidentally, he created USB and is co-owner of the patent.