Tape, cassette & loading
Cassette tape storage, loading/saving programs, load errors, audio levels and tape decks.
94 threads · 866 messages · 2002-01-30 → 2026-08-20
Getting a TS2068 to load from tape, or from a phone or PC standing in for a tape deck, is the most common newcomer question, and the group's answers have settled down. The 2068's EAR input is "a bit deaf": Ariel Ranieri advises putting a powered speaker between the audio source and the EAR jack. Jon recommends starting a tape at about 3/4 volume and adjusting in roughly 5% steps, using the border stripes as a level meter (aim for equal white and black bands during data). A mono cable helps, and Greg Skuza explained that plugging a mono plug into a stereo output can starve the signal. Ryan Gray and Carl Miles decoded what the border colours mean: hiss shows no stripes, any sound gives red/cyan stripes, and the leader tone gives thin bars. For decks, Carl recommends a shoebox recorder with a TONE control. The Radio Shack Realistic Minisette-9 and GE 3-5361 are close relatives of the TS2020, and Richard Burt's Simpson-Sears 20543 is another lookalike, though Richard now uses a MAXduino. Normal-position (Type I) tapes such as TDK D are the right blanks. Newcomer threads from 2023–24 (Adventures in .tap and .tzx, New proud TS2068 owner, Found a Timex Sinclair 2068) all follow this pattern, and many of those owners ended up on the TS-Pico, which loads TAPs from an SD card's /TAP folder.
The other half of the topic is converting tapes into archive files. In the Yahoo era, zxbruno gathered WAV/MP3 captures from members for conversion to TZX, as with the 2009 hunt for the TS1000 Smart Terminal side of the TS2050 cassette. Fred noted that ZX81/TS1000 programs go to .P files rather than TZX, and Oscar Koepke suggested mono, high-bitrate MP3 captures. In the groups.io era the toolchain grew: MakeTZX 2.33 and WinTZX (CATS library tapes 8 and 9), tzxtools tzxwav/tzxmerge, leiradel's tape2wav for TZX files with embedded audio, and FUSE's adaptive loader as the last resort. Ryan's working method in The Crown thread was to massage the audio in Audacity until FUSE loads it, then re-save using a header-reading utility. For ZX81/TS1000 tapes, Martin Vindahl's zx81-dat-tape-reader (which detects the 3.2 kHz frequency rather than amplitude) eventually let Joe VandeZande archive a pile of tapes. ZX81 Tape Converter, EightyOne's WAV loader and tape2wav fill the remaining gaps. In 2026, John Stroebel showed how EightyOne can record a TS2068 SAVE to WAV or play audio straight into a real machine.
Long-running archiving projects include Ryan's 1980s T/S 2068 Library Tape and the Fort Worth TSUG material (2022–26, with Michael Hart posting FW-TSUG-II WAVs), Dan Tandberg's Metagraphics, and David Anderson's Zebra batch (Tech-Draw, Sprites 2068, QED). Jack Boatwright's fire-salvaged boxes in 2024 also produced many unarchived tapes. Several threads only drifted in: a TS1500 LOAD "" fault that turned out to be 2000-series audio being fed to a 1000-series machine, ZX81 SAVE levels too low (Larry Lorenson's transistor-buffer fix), the divMMC thread, the VCF Midwest 2025 photo thread, and a Hot-Z breakpoint sidebar inside the TS-Pico tape thread.
Key threads
- New proud TS2068 owner (and unable to load a program) (#696 on groups.io) — The clearest how-to on volume levels and reading border stripes when loading from tape.
- Adventures in .tap and .tzx (#1154 on groups.io) — Loading TAP/TZX from a phone, which settled that the 2068 is 'a bit deaf' and needs a powered speaker.
- Blank Tape Recommendations?; was: Graphics One Liner - Archiving Interest? (#1403 on groups.io) — Advice on cassette types, shoebox decks with TONE controls, and the Minisette-9.
- Help me fix a file in The Crown? (#778 on groups.io) — A worked example of rescuing a stubborn tape with FUSE, header utilities and tzxtools, and of concatenating TAPs.
- T/S 2068 Library Tape Archiving Process (#65 on groups.io) — A four-year effort to recover 1980s library and FW-TSUG tapes from raw WAVs.
- zx81 tape recovery (#607 on groups.io) — Introduces the frequency-based zx81-dat-tape-reader and how members got it running.
- A couple tapes for you to play around with (#1164 on groups.io) — CATS library tapes 8 and 9 converted with MakeTZX/WinTZX and loaded on real hardware.
- Timex/Sinclair 2020 Cassette Recorder clones (#706 on groups.io) — Lists the decks that are relatives of the TS2020 (Minisette-9, GE 3-5361, Sears 20543) and MAXduino as a replacement.
- A plethora of programs (#1048 on groups.io) — The tape2wav → tzxwav round-trip for TZX files with embedded audio, and the Zebra tape batch.
- Emulators (#24 on groups.io) — Saving from emulators to WAV and feeding EightyOne audio directly into a real machine.
All threads (94)
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