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today's episode comes courtesy of pcbway.com and their community of shared projects this is the first thing we've tried it cost me five dollars to get five pcbs sent over it's a commodore 64 dead test and diagnostics board you've seen it in previous adverts that have popped up on the channel well it arrived and all i had to do was quickly solder it up i put in two sockets two capacitors and a couple of flashed eeproms so no electronics experience required from the whole process of finding ordering and building this board just a little bit of skill with the soldier and iron and when i say skill a minimal amount of skill to put these components in and then it will help me forever more in fixing up commodore 64s i'll probably 3d print a case to put that in to make it a bit more attractive but it's there it's working it's done there's a whole lot more projects like this on pcbway.com in their shared projects section so go and check it out i'm sure you'll find something for all of your retro systems in there and get started on your creative pcb journey and now on with the show hello cave dwellers it's the upgrade you never knew you wanted for your pc the plus deck 2c a five and a quarter inch cassette deck that sits neatly underneath your cd-rom drive yeah i had no idea this thing existed until a chance listing on ebay appeared on my screen and i snapped it up for under five pounds i mean who wouldn't the device first appeared around the turn of the millennium which is long after most of us adopted cds and stepping into the ipod era when we were all ripping our music to mp3 and allegedly sharing them on file services like napster and that's exactly who this was targeting some of the promised features on the box include tape mp3 convert save over 200 tapes for one cd audio pc perfect multimedia audio pc what does that even mean use for internet sounds who doesn't love the sound of the internet hello convenience use cassette tapes in case you missed the part about the cassette tapes and unique it claims to be the first and only device of its type and frankly that really wouldn't surprise me so if you two want to enjoy internet sounds then you'll need a system with a serial port a sound card windows 95 or newer and a 10 megabyte hard drive which i think most of us could have mustered up in the year 2000 and this thing is award-winning and has featured in pc line and how pc magazine reassurance i'm sure in case you doubted its capabilities but enough box reading let's see what we've got inside the box and then get it installed [Music] now what surprises me as i open this up is how many cables there are in the box it's immediately obvious that this doesn't use an ide port like a regular cd-rom drive does and we'll talk more on that shortly because i want to see the unit itself and yes as expected it looks every bit like it was stolen from a cheap japanese car in the 90s a suzuki cappuccino perhaps it does look clean on the inside though so that's a good sign all of the buttons feel fine and we've got a headphone and a microphone jack on the front so that must be the convenience the box promised us looking around the back we've got a standard power connector on the right hand side here and an interface board so by using the included interface cable we plug it in like so and then run that cable to this board which appears aside from the serial port to simply pass the analog audio signals through it we then use these cables to break out from there and feed the audio back into the computer via your sound card that all seems very crude and it is but the funny thing about this is that the analog nature of how this works means there's nothing to stop you from installing this in a modern day pc so long as you have a three and a half mil audio input then you can install this thing and it turns it from a novelty into perhaps quite a useful tool for archiving old software and i will put that to the test although i don't think the manual is going to give us too much help today it advises that there's a high quality japanese deck and audio mechanism which delivers cd quality sound cd quality sound from your cassettes that's the expectation being said here the manual also shows us that the serial port has some use if we use the bundled software it appears that you can trigger the buttons on the front of the deck within the software if that serial k was connected which sounds fun but it's not mandatory as you can just press the buttons so that's how it works and now i need a suitable pc to test it out on and today for that job i've chosen the compact presario 9230 running windows 95 which i'm sure we'll see more of in the near future but for now we just need to know that it looks great i mean look at it and it has space to install our tape deck so what are we waiting for [Music] first we install the rear breakout board you can see that i've got a sound blaster card below it which will feed the audio into once it's fitted [Music] and then around the front i did run into a problem when i was installing the deck this particular case uses drive rails it's no fault of the deck so i can't just slide it into the front as i have no spare rails with the case that poses a problem and the only solution is to take them off the cd drive for the purpose of testing today and that's what we'll do but not before i'd copied all two and a half meg of setup files off of the installation cd but then it went out so sorry cd drive on the inside then we plug the interface cable in and the power and around the back those color-coded audio cables channel the tape deck into the sound card which poses the question couldn't i just put my walkman next to the pc and plug it into the sound card yes yes you could but would that give you internet sound i think not finally the serial cable goes in and that means unplugging my serial mouse i'll have to find a ps2 mouse in its place so that we can use that pull but that's no big problem and there it is if this was a permanent installation i think a few cable ties wouldn't go and miss here but that's it our masterpiece is complete and we're ready to take it for a test drive that purple fascia really isn't doing the look of our tower any favors is it so the very small install file ran through quickly and i'm looking at it thinking if this is plus deck 2 and the box says it's the only device of its type ever created then what was plastic one hmm a mystery for another day now the software is very simple but it does get the job done just as soon as it wants to appear on the screen for us it has all of the controls you'd expect to play either side of the tape fast forward rewind all of that good stuff and then in the settings we have options for how we'd like to capture the tapes and this is great because it automates which side or sides you want to capture and also the quality of the mp3 compression or we can use a straight-up wav file to make a capturing quick today i've stuck with a wav file so we don't have to wait for the pentium 90 here to compress the mp3s and if i just check quickly i've got 872 megabytes free on this original spinning one gigabyte drive in here so that should be fine for our needs today capturing tapes without running into copyright claims is a tricky thing to do so i've grabbed a few mystery tapes and also this game of everyone's a wally for the zx spectrum which has its own theme tune on one side of the tape so perhaps we can get away with that and i've also got a game i'd like to capture but we'll come back to the game capture a bit later so let's get this first tape in and notice when i hit rewind on the screen the tape deck kicks into life via the serial cable and it rewinds which is as to be expected but it's oddly satisfying should we have a listen [Music] now wally was a builder and he had to build yeah that seems to be working fine but unsurprisingly it doesn't sound like a cd as was advertised on the box who'd have guessed it hey i also captured that playback and well the wav file sounds like this [Music] not bad at all really and by that i mean that to my ear it sounds just as good as the quality of the source material it does still sound like the quality of a tape cassette the next tape was an unlabeled mystery tape and it sounded like this my ball went over your wall peter and i ran to get it and i saw your shed full of onions onions susie laughed loudly now i do recognize that that's a secret seven audio book of course i knew you couldn't be meeting there and i have a very particular reason for asking if the secret seven is still going on or not mystery tape number three please no no no s express will absolutely get me a copyright claim so let's move on before that happens werewolves of london is not in this case the warrens evon song by the same name it's an 8-bit game i had as a kid and it's a flippy tape supporting the zx spectrum on one side and the amstrad cpc on the other and this potentially is what will elevate this tape device from a novelty to a useful tool here in the cave because it could help me to easily archive and share tape based games that haven't otherwise been captured i'm thinking about my dragon 32 and my trs-80 cassettes in particular some rare hand-labeled titles that i don't know are out there in the wider world so to try this out i'll capture the zx spectrum side of the tape just like i would any regular song on a cassette headphone users be ready [Music] [Laughter] that being captured i copied the wave file over to this thoroughly modern pc what i have here is the fuse utilities that's part of the zx spectrum fuse emulator software and within that directory we have some tools the one we're interested in is audio2tape.xc and you can see that i've also got our wav file in the same folder here so in theory all i have to do now is run audio to tape specifying the input file that's our wav file and the output file and we'll use the dot tzx extension for the output file that's a tape image file for the speccy and now we get to see how well our game was or wasn't captured it takes about two minutes to run through so i'll skip ahead and the output at the end there seems to indicate that it has worked but to be sure we'll jump into the fuse [Music] emulator and then we'll browse to our new tape image file there it is wwl dot tzx and as if by magic it loads into the emulator hang on a minute that is a knockoff version of warren's yvonne's werewolves of london and the game runs just great so that was a perfect capture of our tape and as we're here i'll show you the way file itself that we captured quickly this was genuinely my first attempt at doing this i was expecting to need a few attempts but it came out great first time and you will see that i had the volume set so that the audio was as loud as possible without clipping i just took it right to the edge and that helps the conversion software to identify those peaks and troughs in the audio that's how i had it set and it seemed to work out perfectly anyway back to werewolfing you like me probably thought at the start of this video that this was going to turn out to be a novelty item that got old really quickly and i'm really pleased to have found a real world use for this in the archival of 8-bit video games on cassettes if you're buying it to copy music off of cassettes well let's be honest who really wants to listen to music from cassettes it was never really a great sounding format in the first place there may be some that disagree with me but that's where i sit firmly but um to be able to archive these old 8-bit tapes is brilliant and come up to the loft with me and just have a quick look i've got a growing collection of cassette tapes here i seem to get more and more with every micro that's donated to the cave and it's wonderful i love them but i would hazard a guess that i might have some hidden gems in here particularly in the trs-80 or the dragon 32 cassette tapes and it almost feels like a responsibility now to go away and make sure if they haven't already been preserved protected and archived for the future that i do that now that i've got this does this offer me anything above and beyond a walkman or a tape deck plugged into a microphone socket no let's be honest its biggest convenience is that it sits in a tower and doesn't take up space on your desk it's nice that it automatically turns the tape over but these are features that you can find in other cassette decks so i'm not going to pretend that this is some wonderful thing but for under five pound i've got my money's worth i think it's a useful thing i won't be keeping it in this old compact i'm going to use it in a more modern pc and you will get to see more of that system in the near future as always thank you for watching i hope you enjoyed today's tech nibble and i'll see you next time take care bye-bye [Music] if you've enjoyed today's video and what i do here in general then consider heading over to patreon.com retro man cave where a small contribution will give you access to all videos one week early without any adverts but most importantly you'll become an official cave dweller i hope to see you there and thank you so [Music] you