The Datassettes

I thought naming my software after the device I learned to program on ~35 years ago (and that stopped being manufactured in the 1990s) would be a nice way to honor its legacy... and would give me a useful unique search term to track when people were talking about my software.

Jokes on me: it turns out the retro C64 community still talks about the original Datasette all over the internet on a weekly basis!

A wonderful security through obscurity way to hide a program.

This bring memories of a lot younger me, coming back home with a C64 magazine and the bundled games, often original commercial ones since back then (early 80s) there was no piracy law in my country, and wasting hours trying to load them from the Datassette, no matter how the head azimuth was set. No way, those tapes were just badly recorded, so I had to try something else. I found then that I could extract from a certain pad on the cassette player pcb the signal picked up by the head after it was amplified, so I built a small driver using a couple schmitt trigger gates of a CMOS chip and used that to send a much stronger and cleaner signal to my Aiwa tape deck. After copying the data that way, I could use the copy into my Datassette which would then load all its content just fine.