It's A Digital Disease!

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/LaundryMan2008 on 2025-02-14 23:47:56.

Today I have something I wasn’t sure I should post as the data is recorded onto VHS in a standard format that can be viewed on a standard VHS recorder/player like data cassettes are unlike the format used by Coleco Adam cassettes which ran the tapes faster and with a low level formatting but I decided to include this one as it’s unusual enough to be worthy of a post.

It is a VHS data tape which is recorded by a special cartridge attached (just a cartridge connector with a thick ribbon cable going to a metal box with 5 lights on it saying power, data, record, high speed and error (error light flashes different amounts depending on the error)) to the back of the Atari 65XE that generates a specialized video signal with DTMF audio cues to tell the encoder what point the data is at, I believe that it came with a specialized player that responded to the DTMF tones to play, stop and search through the tape but I have modified my player by attaching some wires to the tape control buttons on the front and routing them to the back to a male connector which allows the encoder to control the VCR.

There was a version released for the Atari 65xe which is the one I have but the tapes that I have were cheaper for some reason and the original owners bought the Amstrad tapes to save some money like some may have bought Macintosh formatted Zip/Jaz disks if they were cheaper, from what I could gather is that the tapes have a low level formatting stored on them that made using normal VHS tapes a no go, they also had some sort of copy protection like Macrovision which blanked the screen if you tried to duplicate a tape yourself but I defeated that and have a capture of a blank tape if I need more tapes for my Atari.

It seems to me that I am the only person with this equipment and that not even the geekiest of retro geeks have or even heard of it, I also seem to have the high speed version as it has a high speed light and the loader on the tapes starts at low speed before going to to high speed which enables the high speed light, I unfortunately have the encoder box stowed away but I do have one of these tapes and a couple of images of the tape capture (can’t show you actual data (even the low speed loader) because of GDPR data protection as I haven’t gone through and erased the data on them), the original owner of the encoder and the tapes used it at work to store large datasets from scientific tests (from seismographs and radiographs with more I can’t recall).

Thank you for reading this Friday‘s post and I hope you have a great day, if you have any queries, thoughts about the format, additional information or to point out a mistake, please put them in the comments :)

Link to previous post, post 12 (29th week): https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1ik93qg/my_data_storage_mediums_post_13_32nd_week/

I noticed a mistake within the label of my tape which I wonder if you will notice

Another view

The barcode, seems like they had over 600 tapes but they destroyed most of them and kept the really important ones which I have 50 of

Low speed header before the data, used to load the loader in before moving up to high speed loading or continuing at low speed

High speed header, it’s very brief and took me a few attempts to capture it without showing any data, this is the 2nd part of the header as the square part was too hard to capture, as you can see the data is at a higher density and is fed at a higher speed to the decoder based on the scanline passing through the data blocks