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Back when I had a ZX Spectrum 48K, I had a friend that had a 128K and we would swap games for the weekend from time to time.

We did try and make duplicates of the tapes (yes, I know, but we were ten and had no concept of piracy). I had two of those external 5-1/4 inch-drive sized tape units (this kind of thing). I connected them up and tried to make a copy but they would bum out soon after starting. From memory they would suffer from "flutter", I think it is called, or was it wow (or both).

Strangely I seem to remember being able to make a copy of something I had written in BASIC, saved to tape, duplicated, and then had no problems loading. It may be that it was very short or my bad memory.

Out of interest, if one had access to a good hi-fi unit (I did not) could one actually make a duplicate, or did they have other protecting in place? I note there where some very sophisticated tape units available at the time (or soon after) which I understand could give CD a run for its money (e.g. the Nakamichi Dragon or the Pioneer CT-F1250).

Just for the record, I do not condone any such conduct but, for experimental and interest reasons, I wanted to ask.

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  • That "tape unit" thing is a very typical looking desktop audio recorder from the mid 70s to mid 80s time frame.
    – Solomon Slow
    Dec 3, 2018 at 3:13
  • @SolomonSlow IIRC they where called or branded ELTA ...
    – Spektre
    Dec 3, 2018 at 8:46
  • In our days of being too young to understand how many people's income we were stealing, we used to use bargain basement twin-deck players like picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/182816004155_/… with no issues.
    – Tommy
    Dec 3, 2018 at 17:57
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    We used to copy Atari tapes using decidedly normal equipment of the era. No problems.
    – Maury Markowitz
    Dec 5, 2018 at 21:37
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    C64 tape copier here. It was difficult with the 64 because it used a proprietary tape deck and if you copied tapes on your twin-deck that you used for music, they wouldn't load, due to the levels or something. So we used a device advertised in the small ads in computer magazines that we called a 'Trigfall', after the company that made it. It allowed you to plug two C64 tape decks into it, then the device into the C64. Then you pressed play on one and record on the other.
    – Alan B
    Dec 13, 2018 at 14:28

8 Answers 8

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In theory, it is fairly simple duplicating a tape.

The problem with analog tape-to-tape copies is that sound quality lowers and spurious noises are also copied and more are generated into each new consecutive copy generation. It did not contribute to improve the situation, that later tape copy protection methods/turbo loaders (SpeedLock, Alcatraz...) were more sensitive to noise, either due to the higher speeds, and also due to routines listening to noise that was not supposed to be in an "original copy" - or conversely, as @scruss correctly points out, listening to sounds that were supposed to be in the original copy.

To further complicate matters, also later Spectrum/clone models, notably some Spectrum+ models in Spain and Portugal, and the Timex clones were made more "hard of hearing", as a brain-damaged strategy idea to curb piracy (actually the Timex TC2048 clone I owned, had a 10x stronger resistor than the original speccy, in the circuit connected to EAR - e.g. a 10K resistor instead of a 1K resistor, known as R37 in the official ZX Spectrum electronic schematics).

ear

That hardware change meant that often tapes that did load well in a regular ZX 48K Spectrum, did not load in a equivalent machine affected by that change, and would cause additional problems in using copied tapes.

High-stereos hifi devices often did not cut it, due to the technology they had to improve the listening experience. I bought a HiFi stereo double deck tape recorder/radio for listening to music, with a mixer/stereo sound equaliser and never managed to load games from there, let alone copying ZX Spectrum tape/data copies. Ironically, one of the best tape recorders I owned for loading games, was a modest/mono one my father got from contraband from the (now former) Eastern block, made not with ICs but (still) with transistors.

Besides copying tape-to-tape, people back then also used software methods for copying programs saved on tapes, to get better quality/"fresh" copies. From the humble "Pirate" for "normal speed tapes", if memory does not fail me, to the famous "Lerm Tape Copier", "Omnicopy 2", and "The Key", that understood several types of turbo loaders.

Other common strategy, was cracking the protections of turbo loaders, if you had the knowledge, using a Spectrum Z80 debugger like Mons3, and saving them via the Spectrum with normal speed. I still have preserved a copy of "Popeye" where I cracked the turbo loader+related encryption routines, and added a boot menu that asks if I want a normal game play or with infinite lives. ( All done in a modest Spectrum 48K clone and a lot of pacience, free time, intuition and mons3)

Later on, you also started having in the market hardware interfaces - Multiface one, Micro-Pokeer, that dumped all the Speccy memory for tape with a small initial loader. We knew they existed, but they were too expensive and out of reach for us as poor teenagers. Nevertheless, people used them to break heavily protected games, simply by pressing a button as soon they had finished loading a protected game, often still in the presentation/loader screen, if well timed. The latest pirated games that we got, before we abandoned the Spectrum, were software saved with those hardware interfaces. The late titles we got were thus saved in normal speed, and were much easier to copy, even with simple software tape copy programs.

Disclaimer: I wrote a bit later on TAPE2TAP for digitalising Speccy tapes on the PC, and TAPE2TAP assembly routines were used as basis for the tape loader of the Warajevo ZX Spectrum emulator. In 1995, I digitised my entire tape collection to Z80 and TAP files, using my own software, together with a printer port->tape connector.

PS: Tried to save experimental radio broadcasts of Spectrum software in Portugal twice, and whilst some data got in, always got an error before loading the entire program (in the checkum, most probably). But then I lived in almost near line of sight with more than one radio/TV broadcasting antennas for the entire city on the other side of the river for our national channels (and illegal transmitters for Spanish TV channels, but that is a story for another day). So the conditions were less than ideal for saving data programs broadcasted from radio.

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  • 3
    Stereo record heads were much harder to align, too, so often made for less useful copies. I still think the protection on Hewson's "Southern Belle" was the most fiendish: absolutely standard tape loader, but listen for a specific tone a few seconds after the tape finished or lock up …
    – scruss
    Dec 7, 2018 at 21:01
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No, you won't need any 'HiFi' like recorders. After all, these were the very same devices you also used to record your own programs and/or data. While copying from recorder to recorder does always carry a loss in quality, this is of no big influence on a first or second degree copy (*1).

The most important factor is volume. It's much the same as when recording and re-reading data. If the level during recording is too high (*2), reading may not work. Just about every computer manual back than included a paragraph or more to explain level setting and how to find the right level during playback.

This is even more important when using just the recorder as level and sensitivity on both sides are an unknown quantity (*3). The output of the source recorder now has to be adjusted that the cassette is played back at a level which, in conjunction with the input sensitivity of the other recorder, places it somewhere in the middle of the road.

So all needed is spending some time adjusting both recorders.

Now, having said this, there are of course ways to improve the signal, and people did spend money to buy such, to make sure copying went well (*4), but for most cases it was waste of money.

P.S.: The drive shown has nothing to do with any PC standard, like 5.25 inch drive bays or alike. It's just an average cassette recorder, like they were ubiquitous back then.

*1 - As in numbers of consecutive copies.

*2 - Or too low, but that's rarely the reason.

*3 - When recording from the computer, the level is (usually) set well within the defined working range for tape recorders. Only when reading back is adjustment needed. Usually, this is done by turning a litle dial next to the ear/line-out plugs.

*4 - Of course, only for archiving purpose, never to duplicate cassette-based software for resale :))

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    Good answer but I just need to add that also the recording and reading heads sometimes needed an angle adjustment in order to tune the signal for readability, It got a huge impact especially if the tape was recorded on different device... There was a single screw near the head usually accessible during playback (small hole in the chassis)
    – Spektre
    Dec 3, 2018 at 8:52
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It's now well publicized how people used to record programs for their machines, from their radio, which were transmitted by radio-stations .

So maybe you could have played the program on an audio-speaker, and then used the microphone on a cassette-recorder to copy the tape. That may have bypassed the flutter problem .

What about the volume level when you tried copying, it's an issue for people today, when playing these old tapes to their modern-hardware for emulators etc, or is it vice versa.

Maybe games from shops were stored in a finer-detail-format( or machine-code ? ) to prevent copying, don't know .

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  • I know of noone who recorded such programs from any speaker. Everyone I ever met, recording these (it was quite popular in the Netherlands, but as well used in Germany) from radio or TV did always use a cable conection between receiver and recorder.
    – Raffzahn
    Dec 2, 2018 at 23:51
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    Yes, a cable should be used, not a speaker, and volume-level should be the key . When I would look at normal-cassette-tapes playing, I noticed they intermittently made little jumps/shifts while rotating the tape, surprised that programs were not affected. Also noise/static on radio-stations and phone-lines, maybe this was usually not a problem .
    – typingcomputers
    Dec 3, 2018 at 0:32
  • It may be some countries transmitted programs over the airwave, I haven'y heard of that myself. I had the good fortune to grow up in a house with a fairly decent dual-cassette system - just put in the original and copy, press a few buttons, and go. And, of course, this was just to backup my originals for security.
    – user6464
    Dec 3, 2018 at 1:26
  • " I noticed they intermittently made little jumps/shifts while rotating the tape," - that isn't important. The tape speed is set by a capstan rotating against a pinch wheel, with the tape in between. When playing (as opposed to rewinding) there is just a small current through the motor turning one of the tape reels, to take up the slack. The tape reels don't affect the playing speed, unless something isn't working properly.
    – alephzero
    Dec 3, 2018 at 1:30
  • Voja Antonic talks about computer programs being transmitted by radio also in his native Serbia.
    – Lorraine
    Dec 3, 2018 at 14:18
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I had an Amstrad 464, which has an internal tape deck. It was quite common to copy tapes using a twin tape deck. Most portable 'ghetto blasters' in the mid 80s had two decks. Normally only one could record. Some even had a fast copy mode where both would run at double speed.

Game copies would usually work for the first couple of generations, but then would become too error prone. However the Spectrum was more sensitive to this because of the need for external tape players.

As high speed loaders became more common, this became harder to do but still often worked.

Later we used a Multiface attachment to dump memory to disk, which worked fine for any game that wasn't multiload.

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The Commodore 64 was somewhat unusual in that off-the-shelf tape recorders didn't work with it, so you were forced to use the Commodore Datasette unit or later clones thereof. Also tapes copied in a normal twin-deck machine wouldn't load using the Datasette.

One solution was a hardware device that plugged into the cassette port and to which two Datasettes were connected. As the game loaded on one, it could be recorded on the other. These were widely available via small ads in UK computer magazines.

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  • Why couldn't a copied game work?
    – Mark Williams
    Nov 18, 2019 at 7:43
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    You can't use a standard tape deck to either load or copy games on the C64 because the Commodore Datasette is a digital device, it has onboard encoders and decoders. Plus if I remember parts of the signal might have been filtered out by off-the-shelf decks.
    – Alan B
    Nov 18, 2019 at 9:56
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I remember copying games on my ZX Spectrum 48k (one of clones). First, most games were already cracked (like "Cracked by Bill Gilbert"), so there usually were no copy protection. Cracked by Bill Gilbert

The copies were actually made with the help of tape copying programs. They would load blocks into memory and then, after the cassete changed, replay everything back.

I remember using TF-Copy, Copy 86M and Copy copy. Among others, Copy 86M was packing data online as it was loaded from the tape that sometimes allowed us to copy the whole game in a single pass.

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    Exactly. Reliable copying was only possible with tape copying programs. I even recall reading some introductory book on personal computing in my childhood that clearly stated that "analog" copying was physically possible but infeasible in practice due to poor quality of the resultant copy.
    – DmytroL
    Nov 22, 2019 at 12:37
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I have a lot of Oric game cracking/cloning experience

Even without any kind of complex protection, I don't remember even succeeding duplicating a tape. The Oric hadn't any kind of error correction, and a not-so-good error checking mechanism.

I had a dedicated tape player (sold by the shop I bought the computer from) for loading/saving games which used batteries. I remember a few things:

  • just plugging it on A/C to save batteries made all the games fail to load (I used only the A/C mode to rewind/fast-forward)
  • the running speed of the tape was very important
  • the volume playing of the tape was very important
  • I tried other tape players in the house and none of them could load anything
  • We used to swap games with a friend. His tape player could read my tapes, but I couldn't read his, the signal was horribly distorted (but he could load & save from his device without any issue).

So we never trusted tape duplication. It was so much better to use a clone program blindly loading from the computer and saving back to another tape (Hebdogiciel published the "coffee copier" to backup your tapes just in case you spilled coffee on it...),

And if it wasn't possible (because of short tape headers put there to defeat such programs), load the game fully, then hack the NMI handler so pressing NMI button removed protections that crashed the machine when interrupted. Then save proper parts (basic, asm code) to a "cracked" copy after removing the protections in the code.

In those days, you couldn't just be a simple user and you had to hack a lot in the machine to get things done. There was always a solution for each game, and tape duplication was never considered.

Side note: I had a chat with my friend Fabrice Frances that wrote Euphoric emulator and a lot of other amazing things. He could successfully dump .wav files to a CD and load into his Oric from a burned CD: no more speed issues, noise, etc. perfect signal (no analogue process involved as the burned .wav files were generated by the emulator). However he didn't recommend using MP3 format as MP3 could transform the signal in a way that the Oric wouldn't read properly.

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From memory:

  • TRS 80 tapes were a problem even the originals. I can’t remember any copying of tapes there. We did copy the disks though.
  • ZX Spectrum was easy, if you could get a tape without protection that is, with cheap hi if sets with double tape players/recorders.

After that, I never used tape again for my computers.

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