181–190 of 260 posts
I came across a Cartrivision rewinder in a surplus store once. It was a simple device, with a motor, some limit switches, a key switch, and a counter. The counter tracked how many cartridges had been rewound, for billing purposes. Other bad ideas of that era: Polaroid once developed a VHS cartridge with a mechanical counter of how many times it had been played. After some number of plays, the tape jammed.
I have always wondered if it would be possible to build a generic reader for magnetic tapes that essentially just scans whatever tape you throw at it and then it is up to some software to decode the content. I know close to nothing about the details of magnetic recording on tape, so maybe this is just not possible with reasonable effort, i.e. you could but you would need SQUIDs to make it work or something like that.
However, there is hardware and software called GreaseWeazle that actually reads the magnetic flux transitions on the disks to extract the data within.
I have always wondered if it would be possible to build a generic reader for magnetic tapes that essentially just scans whatever tape you throw at it and then it is up to some software to decode the content. I know close to nothing about the details of magnetic recording on tape, so maybe this is just not possible with reasonable effort, i.e. you could but you would need SQUIDs to make it work or something like that.
This is pretty much the only way 5.25" floppies are read today with modern equipment. While you can still get USB 3.5" floppy drives there are no USB 5.25" floppy drives. Modern PCs don't have the correct drive headers anymore, either, and even if they did, they wouldn't be able to read Commodore or Apple II floppies. However, there is hardware and software called GreaseWeazle that actually reads the magnetic flux tr…
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You might be surprised at how the signals are actually recorded on tapes. For VHS tapes for example, it's actually a series of stacked "diagonal" lines of signal. Imagine a sequence of symbols like \\\\\\\\\\\, except at any given horizontal point along the tape there are about 5 stacked traces of signal. They're also diagonal on audio cassettes, but much less "slanted" relative to the tape's length. I don't remember…
If you "scan the magnetism" for the whole width of the tape -- which such a generic reader for magnetic tapes would have to do anyway -- you can parse out such things after the fact. adg. .beh ..cf Even if your input is "a..db.gec.hf", that should be able to postprocess out later, for any possible angle, given enough resolution. It's a lot like decoding music from vinyl grooves based on a 2D image scan of the vinyl.
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It isn't clear to me why it's unreasonable to have different pricing for rental vs. owning. In any case, the general trend seems to be towards not owning digital media in general.
Which occasionally has unexpected consequences. The licensing of the music on certain movies didn't anticipate the internet. And the studios never came to an agreement. As a result you can buy DVDs of movies like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullets_Over_Broadway , but you can't rent them off of any streaming service. Given that most of us no longer have DVD players, th…
I came across a Cartrivision rewinder in a surplus store once. It was a simple device, with a motor, some limit switches, a key switch, and a counter. The counter tracked how many cartridges had been rewound, for billing purposes. Other bad ideas of that era: Polaroid once developed a VHS cartridge with a mechanical counter of how many times it had been played. After some number of plays, the tape jammed.
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Similarly, Beavis and Butthead has never had a release that mirrors the broadcast because of the music videos.
This shit is the entire reason I bother with piracy at all. I very, super-duper much don't want to maintain a media server, but I do want several things in their full, original versions (Beavis and Butthead is one, in fact, but there are several), or that flat-out can't be had otherwise, or whatever, and as long as I'm having to maintain the server anyway.... If they (all these companies) ever fully sort out audio ri…
I actually see piracy as a moral imperative. Without it, we would not be able to properly preserve culture.
I have always wondered if it would be possible to build a generic reader for magnetic tapes that essentially just scans whatever tape you throw at it and then it is up to some software to decode the content. I know close to nothing about the details of magnetic recording on tape, so maybe this is just not possible with reasonable effort, i.e. you could but you would need SQUIDs to make it work or something like that.
This is pretty much the only way 5.25" floppies are read today with modern equipment. While you can still get USB 3.5" floppy drives there are no USB 5.25" floppy drives. Modern PCs don't have the correct drive headers anymore, either, and even if they did, they wouldn't be able to read Commodore or Apple II floppies. However, there is hardware and software called GreaseWeazle that actually reads the magnetic flux tr…
Not that long ago, motherboards still had a floppy controller. These computers do mostly still work.
So do the ones from the 80s, for that matter.
>USB 3.5" floppy drives
To anybody considering: Don't bother. They can only read/write the most standard IBM PC format. No flux streams.
Instead, get any old floppy drive and a greaseweazle at about the same cost. You'll be able to read and write all sorts of formats, and recover data from damaged and otherwise unreadable floppies.
[0]https://lunchmeatvhs.com/blogs/blog/rescue-your-awesome-anal...