MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: Prototype RCA Arcade Game from 1975 Dumped and Emulated

>> > The program data was found on an audio cassette at the Hagley Museum And Library
>
>> That's a mighty robust audiocassette to still be playable 40+ years after it was made
>> and recorded on.

>My experience is that tapes of that vintage are usually still playable, at least if they've
>been stored in good conditions. The binary data is generally encoded as a series of long
>and short square waves, so you can often recover the data even if there's quite a bit of
>noise. Personally, I've successfully archived Astrocade tapes from as long ago as 1979.

It makes me curious if the tapes used with the RCA Fredotronic arcade hardware incorporate audio output for sound effects as well or if the sound effects are simple analog discrete output from the RCA Fredotronic arcade pcb hardware components. I haven't looked the available source code yet, but it is neat to see this being done at this time.

I noticed you were asking about tape details within the thread. I hope one or two of the folks involved will be able to get all the specs down to being accurate enough that the video (and audio?) data output will almost match what is shown from the cab photos from the mid 1970s.

I never heard about the RCA Fredotronic before so this is new to me. I hope it can also be supported in MAME, but probably more hurdles having to be done in MAME first before there is any chance of RCA Fredotronic being supported.....first would be getting permission to be able to support the games.....but I hope it will be possible.

btw: Seeing the block/square style cabs in the photos is amusing. The side art is interesting. That would be something if one of the 3D cab modelers can recreate the cab and sideart for emulation scene.