JamHamster

15 Nov 2024

My Happy place. 😊

This has to be c*ck up of the year. I've been setting up this mini PC, and the fan started making a grinding noise. Gave it a quick blow through with an airline and the fan blades shattered into a billionty 9 pieces and took out every single blade. 😂

Not an ideal solution but if it spins, it wins! That heatsink is comically small and the thermal compound is terrible and badly applied (apparently). I haven't made a custom heat sink in a while... 🤔

It uses thermal pads. Presumably to make up the difference in height between the two chips but the shorter chip is barely touched. 2/10, must do better. 😂

Thought I'd bite the bullet and install 26H2 - Now I need to restart my pc in the mornings to get internet access and for some reason the DeviceInstallDisabled policy was set to 1 afterwards, removing my ability to install a scanner. Looks like I'll be rebuilding my pc tomorrow then... 🤔

It did indeed take a while, My i9 processor was affected by the instability issues and nothing worked. Installed the microcode patch and it flew on. Also solved some other problems I was having. Win11 Debloat worked like a champ and stripped out a bunch of useless nonsense (82 apps!). 😯

That microcode fix works a treat, no stability issues and I can run my machine at full bar. It sounds like a bin truck but gets the job done. 😊

Got up early to get a jump on the rebuild. Lolled at the accidental tagline during setup: "Windows 11 - This might take a while." 😂

This thing has been lidless since I got it. I'm going to try to design a 3d printed one. It has a weird hinge system but seems doable enough. 🤔 I have a couple I can reference which makes things a little easier.

Still fiddling with the action and design. It's very nearly there. I also laser cut a smoked perspex window and etched it. It needs more paint infill but the general look is okay. ☺️

thingiverse.comReplacement Commodore 64 Datasette Door by jamhamsterA replacement door for a Commodore 64 Datasette. It comes with a grille to cover insert into the front of the door (a dab of glue in the corners will hold it in place). I've also included an .svg if you want to cut and etch your own acrylic window.I spent some time testing and getting the action right and it's just about there.

If you need a door, I uploaded it to Thingiverse. 🙂 www.thingiverse.com/thing:7421080

And by a cruel twist of fate, the deck has stopped outputting sound. Hold please. 😂

Spent some time tuning the action and had to veer away from the original design a little to get it right but it should be smoother and stronger than the stock (in normal use of course!) Oh, the audio issue was some schmutz on the head. 😂

The hinge is really weird and makes my brain go boss-eyed. If I can crack that, the rest will be a breeze. I'm going to just print the hinge part and iteratively adjust. 🙂

I still have some adjustments to make but it works!! ☺️

Got parallel encoding working properly in JitterBug. It converted over 3,027 tap files using tap2audio and lame to both .WAV and MP3 and also embedded the TAP file image rendition into the MP3. In just over 17 minutes. 🤓

Thought I'd give Google Gemini a go on a subject I know quite well... It very confidently made a bunch of stuff up, none of it was even slightly correct.

Side Quest 2 (Electric Boogaloo) I have a cheapie MP3/SD card cassette recorder (CR-669) and I'm going to have a play with converting TAPs over to real tape. In theory, it shouldn't be that hard but I've said that before... 😂

I tidied up the images, and plopped some text on. I'll write up a guide and use these as examples. 🙂

jamhamster.wordpress.comCreating tapes for the C64 with a CR-669 portable cassette recorder.I got a cheap portable cassette player with SD/USB and MP3 capability and thought I’d see if it could be used to convert .TAP images back to original cassette tapes so I could load them on a …

jamhamster.wordpress.com/2026/10/04/c... And blogged. 🙂

First recording results are in. I'm using tap2audio to convert to .WAV, Sine, with no inversion at full volume and checking the result with HeadAlign. The double lines mean it's too loud. This overdrives the deck waveform into an M shape. The Schmitt triggers on the falling edge twice. 🤔

I've been running the numbers using a .TAP of Sanxion. I had to go from volume setting 254, all the way down to 10! 😧 The C64 seems to like it really quiet but Sanxion loads. The recording is supposed to be a sine wave but I tried square and it's way better which I wasn't expecting.

I have a bodged lead for monitoring tape output on the scope and some clean source files. WDWII is an example of one that's no bueno. The controls on the tape deck l are hilariously counterintuitive so I'll skim the manual first, then shove some MP3s up it to see what's what. (Boots C15 FTW) 🙂

I've been down a rabbit hole of C64 TAP images of late. It's very hard to tell what's what. I've got a PS script that will pick through TAP files and pop out a visual representation in PNG format. It's dead easy to spot a wrongun at the merest glance now...

All run through the fixer, and the vice batch test is done. For the very worst batch, it tidied as many as it killed but I can just replace the worst ones with another variant. 🙂

Experimenting with multi threaded scan runs. It'll query the tap for variance and copy the tap to folders 0-9 (0 great, 9, terrible). it also generates a PNG representation of the file in the output folders. It can scan 3,000 odd files in about 15 seconds. It is pleasingly rapid. 🙂

I ran the Ultimate TAP Archive through the query tool and it picked out some less than great ones so I ran the Jitter Fix. I'm batch running a few thousand through VICE to make sure it didn't break anything. It'll run, load the TAP and capture a screenshot after 20 seconds. Shouldn't take long... 😂

1,883 tested. There's way less blue than I was expecting. 😊

I think I'm onto something - Quite a few TAP files have timing errors. The timing errors in some taps mean this works on an emulator but are more difficult to convert to actual tape as there's much less room for error and the tape will add to the issues. I might have a fix for it... 🤔

I've made a tool (JitterBug) that's turning into a one stop shop for all your TAP needs. It's currently running a sort into folders 0-to 10 based on timing jitter. It'll also use three repair methods and convert to wav and MP3 in one fell swoop with a choice of waveforms (sine, square, and Squine).😊

Before and after thumbnails are showing some decent cleanup being done to the worst images I could find . 😊

I need a nicer menu but the core options are all there. It accidentally turned into a decent TAP management tool. I have some widdling about to do but it seems to get some lovely results. I sense a blog post and github release in my future.

Whoops, it's not as bad as it looks - I accidentally scooped up a bunch of ZX Spectrum Taps but this was a happy accident as these were correctly classified as not being C64 images and will be spat out into their own folder. 🙂

It's a scan report of every TAP I could get my hands on (Minus the Speccy games!). It'll be worth running a repair sweep on the remainder to see what I'm left with, and find out if the tools do any actual good.

The code scores each tap file with a confidence rating based on checksum and jitter detected in the TAP itself. I've done some spot checks and this is matching the results on real hardware. It chucks in into buckets 0-10 0 is perfect, 10 is unusable. Would anyone find this tool useful?

3,000 files in and the scores on the doors are worse than I thought.... 😯

Batch MP3 conversion & thumbnail integration sorted. I also took a quick look through the set and weeded out and replaced the duff 'uns. Spot checks with Vice help to validate stuff (Doesn't take long at 363,516% CPU) 😂

I'm currently processing every .TAP file I have (31,000 odd) and have a script that classifies them into folders numbered 0-10 based on fidelity - Some are especially bad (Yeah, I'm looking at you Cuthbert in Space) I want to have a management tool that I can share on GitHub once it's all working.

Tree removal day! It's dead and won't fall for a while but it's the right thing to do. It's the first time I've needed to pay someone to do something since I moved in as I've taught myself how to do everything else. ...and my tree climbing days are a few decades behind me. 😂

I need a workshop chair. I have all the bits except for a seat so I'll see what I can do with a scaffold board. I'll also need to learn upholstery which I'm rather looking forward to. 😁

Well that was disappointingly straightforward. Shaped the base with a belt sander and carved a perineal dip (don't want to paralyze my leg again!). Stuffed it with the contents of an old cushion, test sitting as I went, then sealed it up as if staples were going out of style. 😂

The sky is always interesting in Hove. A straight banger of a sunset last night, harvest moon this morning and a partial rainbow over the tree at the bottom of the garden. It's quite fitting as it's being cut down on Monday ('cos it's as dead as A-Line flares with pockets in the knees.) ☺️

And it does it again, nice one sunshine! ☺️

Oh dear, my print bed is a smidge wonky... That'll keep me entertained this evening. 🤔

It took a whole bunch of tape but it's better. Apparently anything under 0.3 is fine for printing so I'll leave it there. Anything more would just be numbers theater. 🙂