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There should be more restoration stories with a human element like this... great stuff.

Noel, I would love to see you repairing an old tape recorder.

I love the way it starts up almost instantly.

I can see two ways of recovering the data from the volume dipped portion of the recording. The simple way is to add gain to the section of audio with the dip, which can be done right in Audacity. It does not have to be perfect but you can't raise the gain so much that it would peak; it just has to be loud enough for the signal highs and lows to be detected past a threshold. The second way is how we did it back in the 1980's - throw the source cassette into the left side of your hi-fi stereo system, throw a blank cassette into the right side, bump up the EQ a few decibels across all frequency ranges, hit record on the right side, play on the left side, and enjoy some of the weirdest progressive jams you have ever heard while it transfers the data to the new cassette. Even though it is data, it is still technically audio and therefore you can manipulate it the same way as audio.

For the data recovery part, using a sound card that has a LINE-IN input would be preferable to a microphone input, to avoid the eventual filters and amplifiers of the mic input. And also, trying to have the volume as high as possible for recording (like ~80%) without it being saturated/clamped.

Excellent episode. Nice mix of a restoration along with some data recovery. Restoring an old cassette recorder would be great.

This guy John was an absolute legend. He wanted his childhood TI to find the best home possible.

Good luck with the floppy recovery! Your work with the tape recovery was really impressive!

OMG ! An "Elephants never forget" floppy. I used to love those...well at least I loved the ads in magazines, as I never had a disk drive at the time for my Sinclair ZX Spectrum =)

If you can't fix a wobbly sound file by processing it, say the frequency is inconsistent due to tape stretch, it's really fun writing some code to interpret the sound file, It's mostly about counting zero crossings but can take some fiddling and tuning to get right. Most tape formats I played from had little to know error checking. I guess some has a very basic checksum. The exception was the C64, which had a very overengineered format which is why C64 tape loading and saving is so ridiculously slower that other systems of the era.

Awesome! I got a little bit emotionally moved, remembering how was my first time recovering games from my childhood and play them again many years later. That were my first steps in retrogaming, and I never stopped since then.

Yes, please do a video on restoring the Cassette Tape Players.

Just to spread some knowledge, the type of key switches in the keyboard are of the stackpole variety. I would really like to see the PEB (Peripheral Expansion Box (the box with the disk drive)) up and running with John's game.

Great video Noel. I recently fired up my Amstrad CPC 464 from 1985 and tried loading programs from multiple cassettes that I had back in the day. To my surprise 90% of the cassettes loaded fine.

That TI-99 is such a beautiful machine and that Trinitron is clean. John really hooked you up! Great vid and look forward to seeing the next episode.

Really interesting to see the process. That TI99 brings back some (very old) memories!

Great video! I donated my old ZX Spectrum to my friend along with a C90 full of programs I typed in from magazines - including a couple I wrote myself. He did the same and recovered the programs I wrote. It's such an intense nostalgia overload seeing something on the screen you wrote almost 40 years ago. It's quite moving.

That's such a nice idea. Kudos to you!

I wasn't screaming, but I was mentally sending the message. Yeah, one of those guys who had everything your neighbour had. Synth, joysticks, PEB, _and_ a Radio Shack replacement keyboard -- the one sold back in around 86 or so.

Tape access anxiety is a real thing! Oh boy, this brings me back... I had 3 copies of every program I made.

Noel, I had an old Sinclair Spectrum game on tape that went quiet in one part. I put it in Audacity went bonkers with the amplify till the quiet part was 100% and yes it clipped. I played it into the Spectrum first time after 35 years. I made a CD with the WAV file. I later found out the spectrum just counted the pulses on the tape. As long as the tape recorder amplifier does not distort you should be fine rescuing games. I hope that helps.

Sanyo products used to be very reliable, so it doesn't surprise me it ended up being the best tape deck for your purposes 😁. Can't speak for anything more modern though.

as a youngster, i get the feeling of nostalgia for things i experienced not many years ago. How nice it must have been to bring back memories from more than three decades ago. love it

You can bake the tape slightly. Thats how they make the material adhere back to the plastic. Always with tape you keep the high at 2+ and you will get good results. Also you can still buy shells you can move the tape into. Ive noticed the spindles on older tape shells can be very heavy. Hope i helped. I have been making audio tape collages for 20 years. So im not a scientist but i know tape. Lol.

Great video Noel, especially how the story unfolds. Look forward to more.

The keyboard looks to be the way the BBC Micro did it’s keys - you could thump them and the key mechanism was basically unaffected since it wasn’t the pressure of the key push that directly closed the contacts.

ah the memories...that was my first computer. Worked with it to learn basic, and then we got a TRS-80 Color Computer...I wrote a lot of basic games (text adventures) for myself and my friends to enjoy. Thanks for bringing all those days back to me. Good luck with the restoration of the floppy drive unit.

Hey Noel, so I've recovered exactly things like that, with low volume, you had. If you zoom in all the way in audacity you'll be able to see a pattern. For the ZX81 it's something like short and long repeating pulses (3 vs 7 maybe if I remember). So if you can glean what each section should have been (i.e. you can usually still see how long each pattern was) you can just copy a good 1 or 0 (3 vs 7 pulses from the proper volume level) in the place of the bad (low volume) sections. As long as you don't add in too much of time difference, it doesn't have to align exactly, it should be fine. Worked a treat.

An awesome video as always. This brings back memories of my TI-99/4A and some of the basic I learned.

Great experience ! Thanks for sharing... I had the same cpc464 green monitor....

Noel, this was fantastic. I'm really looking forward to you getting the PEB working and seeing if John's game is on one of his disks.

This was fantastic, Noel. My childhood machine was also a TI-99/4A with PEB, Speech, etc. Wrote many XB games for it. No idea what happened to it though. 😥

Love this, so good of you and very entertaining to watch too! Have to admit that I'm a native British English speaker and it took me a few moments to decipher "Dogfight"! Thanks Noel, you are a star!

Yeah, sure about the tape player repair videos ! That's always interesting !

Oh gosh, the _memories_ this brought back!

It's great fun finding old tapes and trying to load them back in - I found two of my old c90 tapes, one for the Spectrum, one for the Electron - my very first program written on the Spectrum on boxing day of 1983 was still intact (used simple line drawing commands to draw a representation of Airwolf). A few machine code routines from magazine type-ins were still on there too along with some badly drawn graphic screens that I had saved. I also recovered some of my Electron code and was able to load it back on to a real Electron that I had just purchased a few months ago. I also used Audacity, along with a cheap £9 usb powered tape player to get the data recorded into a laptop, which then played back direct to the computers after some volume tweaking and filtering. Huge nostalgia hit!

Amazing ! I had the exact same machine, speech synthesizer and the TI tape recorder! I also owned the Parsec and Alpiner games so this was a great flaahback for me !

Great result! TBH I was half expecting to see the Sony in use as it's an extremely reliable tape deck (I can personally vouch for that model's performance), but I loved seeing the Sanyo because it's period correct. Can't wait to see how the floppy disk recovery goes.

This is a beautiful work :)

Damn, John! Your Boy hooked it Up! Thats awesome!

I had one of these as my first computer as a kid. Loved Parsec and Alpiner. Also Hunt the Wumpus, "TI" Invaders, Tombstone and probably loads of others I've forgotten.

Awesome. That was my very first computer that I purchased from JC Penney about 40 years ago (or so). I was just talking to someone about this and my Commodorc Vic 20 and then the Commodore 64. So cool this popped up today. 🙂

When testing PSUs that aren't connected to anything, try putting the multimeter into AUTO-V LoZ. This will apply a small amount of load onto the device you are testing. So the power rails are not floating and giving weird or vague results. If your testing voltage in circuit, then yes use the normal voltage modes.

Great job! And the TI with NTSC is a nice companion for the PAL one. ;-) I'm envious that you've got the original PEB now! Great fun watching a new video, I wished you would make videos more often though,

Thanks for sharing this! I always enjoy a TI99 video as this was my first PC as well and yours are always top notch. Really would like to see you get into the expansion box, that was but a dream when I was kid. Even now you don't see all that much of them on YT.

cool video, i too love old tape decks! would be great to see you repair them. keep up the great work!

Just ran across this video and the tape brande brought me back. All my ZX81 programs are on the same type brand (they came in packs of 5 with different colors). So cool! Fond memories of programming on my friend's TI99!

_This_ is what it should all be about! *Bringing back happy, geeky memories.*

I was shouting at the screen "you need to plug in an extended BASIC cartridge". Glad to find out you heard me

Instead of using old home computer-style tape decks where the basic tape transport mechanism can damage the tape, it might be safer to use a walkman or hifi system tape deck where the tape transport mechanism is way more regulated (with useable drive belts of course). And even if this kind of tape deck works in stereo, you can switch the recording you make on the computer back to mono afterwards. I also recommend to use a manual audio cassette tape rewinder (you can directly feel the effort put into the rewinding with the hand that's moving the crank, so you can stop it before breaking the tape and open the cassette in order to fix it) like the ones that were made by Radio Shack to give the tape a full back and forth rewind, it will properly align the tape into the cassette before using it in the tape deck. I used an Aiwa HS-GMX50 to transfer a 35+ Y/O Agfa C-120 cassettte tape content to record it, and the uncompressed audio files (WAV 44.1 Khz 16 bit mono) were perfectly recognized as programs on my Sharp PC-1350. If you don't have an SVI Cache you can also use either the computer where the WAV file is or copy it on a smartphone (or even a WAV compatible MP3 player) to connect it to the target computer tape interface. Most of the time, the stereo audio out doesn't interfere in the transfer. For the damaged audio section of the second program (it looks like a "simple" ampltude level problem to me), it could be interesting to zoom on this section, then manually modify the output volume of every subsection (since it goes down, then up) in order for the waveform of this section to look more like the rest of the whole audio file. If it still doesn't work, you can try to apply passband filters. And of course keep the original audio anyway.

My dad had one of those realistic cassette players he purchased for his trs-80 and his Trs-80 portable. It even had a pleather case. Just a cheap one for dust protection. I still remember those very small keys and playing my old bones and dodo McDonald’s happy meal tapes on it. It was so compact for the time😃

The memories are priceless.

Hi Noel, thanks for the nostalgia trip. I use Macs now. When I had the TI 99 4A, I was taking a "Computer Concepts" course, which used an IBM 360, in Blue. Dot matrix printer. BASIC. I also learned TI 99 4A BASIC version! Sweet!

Man, my TI99/4A is still sitting in a box with the games, controllers and tape player/recorder. Haven't used it in forever. I even still have some of those same books, dug them up to go with my other books. Nice to see how it is on the inside though. Some day I'll load it up, thanks to that restoration bit.

Amazing stuff Noel, I can't wait to see what you find on those floppy disks! The game John described sounds like some sort of artillery game, looking forward to his reaction if you discover that one :)

just got myself a TI 99+4 like that and i was happy to find it has the alps key switches just like my trs 80 model 3. my apple iie enhanced has another brand but still mechanical. they all feel nice.

The Ozark Mountain Daredevils made some good music in their day. I remember drinking beer many an evening while listening to, "Jackie Blue" or "If You Wanna Get to Heaven". (Hey, this was in my mis-spent youth...) Standards for cassette recordings varied per country. Japan tended to record to a signal level of 0 db peak, whereas the US tended to record to -3db. Either level will work, but you may have to lower the gain on a 0db recording. Sanyo made good gear, too, especially back then. Good work on the keyboard! Those can be tricky. Later keyboards made for the Ti99-4/A had bifurcated spring switches that were individually replaceable.

Restoring and collecting makes for a good Video, but inviting the previous owner to share some memories of the Device really does it for me, I love it!

Man, that Funky Stars at 6:08 !! So many nice memories, even if it's not from the CPC era for me.

Great video as always Noel. I would be interested in watching a video of you fixing the cassette recorders. I have a retro cassette datacorder that doesn't work and it would be cool to gain some insight on how to fix it.

I had a TI994A and still do, but when I was young we had a cassette based game called Tunnels of Doom that took close to 30 minutes to load, and failure was pretty high - esp. if batteries were low. I was able to hook mine to a modern LCD TV by connecting to modulator to antenna adapter for cable connections. I kind-of lucked into it, but your video quality looks better. 👍🏻

That is wild! Way to go, Noel!

This was fascinating, audio data storage is an interest of mine. Shame about that volume dip in that recording. I think it may be recoverable but would be a lot of work.

The TI99/4A was my first computer. You could change all characters in graphics using Hex codes (CALL CHAR). Still a star in Hex codes because of it. Filled entire graph books with 8*8 artworks. Now working in the PLC industry this knowledge is still valuable.

That's a good idea to bring old memories back

Yes, a video of tape player repair!

great video Noel ! and i love the chicken train section, so funny ! and even better, an Amstrad CPC 6128 to help with the rescue

through audio editing i believe it's not really hard to restore that faulty area of the tape, i'm used to that kind of stuff in sound design and restoration, you can start by trying to just normalize the volume applying the "inverse" curve carefully... there are many ways, and it would be very useful to understand what's supposed to be the right wafeform for 1's and zeros ...

Oh the memories! TI-99/4A was the first computer I got when I was a kid and since I couldn't be one of the k3WL kids who had Apple //s and tons of games, I spent all summer vacation playing around with the BASIC programming manual that came with it. Another fun thing was typing in the programs from computer gaming magazines. I guess everything turned out ok though because when I took a BASIC class that following school year, I became a teachers aid for the class because I knew more than the teacher.

Its so heart harming watch the man nostalgia seeing his childhood games:)

Thanks for this new video Noel!. It's an incredible sensation when you are able to preserve your own (or in this case your neighbour's) old programs. Good work!! Glad to confirm that you didn't had to deal again with the TMS9929 and the smd board to get the RGB signal we used in the past (just a heads-up: nowadays we have the great evolution named "TMS-RGB" from Nicholas Piegdon). In regards of tape images for Ti-99/4A it would be great to have a fraction of the utilities for the Speccy. It would be awesome too to have some tape format supported on the FinalGrom99. Cheers from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean 😊

I did the same with my first (unfinished) childhood game the other day. Transfered it from the CPC6128 disk to the PC 30 years later. I feel for the guy :-)

The TI-99 puts 12 V on the line the C64 uses for luma, so don't use an S-Video or the Luma connection on a 1702 or similar since the 12 V can damage the monitor. The key switches on that keyboard are an early type made by Hi-Tek. They have a weakness where the white square plastic plungers break in some or all of the 4 corners so that they can't retain the keycaps. The sides also splay out and get stuck in their sockets. I have a PET and and Heathkit terminal using the same keyswitches and they all have loose keycaps or sticking keys because of this. TI-99/4As are the only source for period replacement of these plungers that I've found (although TI used several different kind of keyboards, so it's a gamble when buying one that you'll get a Hi-Tek keyboard.) I'm working on a 3D printed replacement, but I haven't got anything to work satisfactorily yet.

OMG, that Sanyo :) My childhood memories with the ZX81 :)

my first computer was A TI-99 4A also. I had the extended basic cartridge,and the speech synthesizer. but not the memory expansion / Floppy Disk drive. I spent hours writing programs for it. I miss it 😪 but now I code with Liberty Basic. which works on a modern windows computer.

I wrote a lot of games back in the '80s on an Atari 800XL. Being stupid kids, we gave it all away in 1994. At the time it seemed like we had had it FOREVER ... a whopping 11yrs. And that was now 29yrs ago :-/ ... my brother and I still talk about those games, and I still remember the long cool summer nights, the endless rounds of coding and testing and revising.

A great video as usually. Thx a lot. I'm already waiting for the next one now 😂.

That was my first computer and tape drive. I got it for xmas when I was around 10 years old and before xmas I found it and took it apart. After I got it apart and then had to put it all back together and put it back in the hiding spot. It worked fine after xmas, lol. The tape drive was a pain in the butt.

I had Cauldron on my colour CPC 464 - loved that game 🙂

That was my first childhood computer as well, I was no more than maybe four years old. A couple of years later we replaced it with a Commodore and a 2600. Still remember playing hunt the wumpus, munchman etc.

I had a hacky solution with a VRM from an Arduino kit and a 12v adapter to power my RC2014. Failing high... is not good. 5v circuits do not like 8v+(it was 8v when I started moving to disconnect, but it read 11ish after disconnect, not sure what hit the computer). I should have checked the current limits of the VRM I was using, if I had, I might still have a VRM(let out the magic smoke) and a VGA terminal board(did not let out the smoke, but it doesn't connect to a keyboard or output video) Thankfully my core modules survived, at least. It works over a serial link.

Really loved this 1 Noel especially the music

Can't wait to see what's on the floppies!

John! my first computer was a TI99!! hahaha! this is fantastic!! you have a great neighbor!!! :D:D:D -Cholly

Restoration vids of folks old computers are the best restoration vids

There might be a digital copy of that tape online, somewhere. A lot of old 8-bit computers have online archives going back to the 80s. It might be possible to recreate a good copy of that program by copying the digital data onto a new cassette tape.

That was my exact setup.... brings back fond memories

Yes, I’d also love to see you restore those two Radio Shack cassette recorders, please.

Nice job. It's so hard backing up old cassettes onto modern computers. They seem to amplify tape hiss and exaggerate drop-out.

I still have the 99/4A my dad bought in 1983, proudly on display in my 'mancave'. Sadly the Trinitron TV died some years ago..

Wonderful Noel, great job!!! Hope to see you working on those Floppy Disks soon :-) Greetings, Michael

I had one of those Sanyo tape recorders in the past, kind of wondering if I still have it somewhere, I know I have an ITT "Professional" recorder and a modern Sony one too, but I don't recall whether the Sanyo stuck around... :\

The tape says Dogfight and Quest, great video!

The audio is not fully gone. Use dynamic range compression and EQ. It would be easier to do that in a DAW than in Audacity, you can experiment first in real time to find parameters, then use automation to draw parameter changes since the changes are dynamic and change over time. For a DAW i suggest Reaper as it is free-to-try forever (and non commercial license costs 60$, if you remember WinAmp.. Reaper is made by the same developer..and they are super cool so well worth the support.. it is also just 15mb install file which is ridiculous for maybe the best DAW on the market.). Unfortunately the data is modulated, so there is no guarantee but there could be enough to make it work. There are also other options, like deliberately clipping the audio a bit. I would also capture the audio from the tape again, with different levels and adjust the play head azimuth angle as that has a HUGE effect. I would actually like to take a look at the audio files, i'm sound engineer by trade, with electronics background and was tinkering with 8 bit computers in the 80s.

omg Cauldron on amstrad, this game was awesome . I suddenly feel nostalgic

I am wondering if the game gave the out of Memory Error, because you don't have the PEB "Peripheral Expansion Box" Connected that you had showed in some of the footage. I expect it will have the Memory Expansion in it. I like how your worked to get the Tape recovered. I had a Ti99/4a in the late 80s and could never get the tape drive to successfully load after saving something on it. I was young and didn't have proper instructions on how to use the 99/4a at the time. It makes me wonder if I could get the tape drive working with the 99/4a I have now.

they have a usb tape player looks like a walkman kinda thing I used that to back up a 1 of a kind music tape for someone. At least for backing up to pc then you can deal with the data later

Your contact's statement about cheap tape decks working better than expensive ones is supported by the Timex Sinclair 1000 user manual. I'm hoping to put this to the test once I've finished repairing my Sony hi-fi deck. Right now, I have a Panasonic shoebox deck from the 2000s which doesn't work too well, and a Timex Sinclair cassette player that does the job when volume and tone are around 7-9.

Technology is getting to the level where a computer can be reunited with its childhood neighbour