A Commodore Boombox: The 1350 as You've Never Heard It Before

A Commodore Boombox: The 1350 As You’ve Never Heard It Before | Hackaday

No, this isn’t another product from [PeriFractic]’s revived company, though we hope he’s taking notes. This is, in fact, a hack on the beloved 1530 Datasette, using the tape mechanism and case to create a portable audio device for your precious remaining mix tapes. Well, [Jan Derogee]’s precious mix tapes, at any rate; we aren’t the government, we don’t know if you have any tapes, mixed or otherwise.

[Jan] started, obviously enough, with a Datasette, but they key was apparently to use a Made-in-Japan model– the Made-in-Taiwan units are a later development and victims of the old Commodore’s infamous obsession with cost-cutting. The main difference is that the Japanese-built Datasettes have two sets of screws: one to hold the tape mechanism in place, and the other to hold two halves of the case together. The Taiwanese units make one set do double duty. Doubtless more was saved through streamlining assembly than the cost of four screws, but either way it made those models difficult to work with for [Jan]’s purposes.

As you likely can tell from the photo, he simply splits the case, allowing the tape transport to remain in place with those Japanese screws, and inserts a 3D printed spacer to hold speakers, audio amplifiers, and a bay for AA batteries. For the people who really care about such things, the mod appears to be fully reversible, though you won’t be able to use it as data entry for your C64 until you do reverse it. Given how slow and dodgy tape loads could be, though, that’s not likely to bother many people, since it’s so much easier to load media onto the old breadbox from an emulated tapedeck.

If, on the other hand, you can’t stand the idea of using a Datasette for anything but data storage, maybe you should try connecting yours to a modern PC to remind yourself what it was really like. In either case, you can check out the 1530 Boombox at the link above or the video embedded below. For the actual Commodore product we didn’t see coming, click here for the phone.

3 thoughts on “A Commodore Boombox: The 1350 As You’ve Never Heard It Before”

The title has the numbers wrong… 1350 ;)

Loaded from some data mix-tape?

Report comment

Bc it is still human-made

Report comment

yep… should be 1530, please fix it as the 1350 is a mouse, this project is not about a mouse being converted to a boombox, that could be fun too but is a completely different project.

Report comment

More from this category

Search for:

Never miss a hack

Follow on facebook Follow on twitter Follow on youtube Follow on rss Contact us Subscribe

If you missed it

Linux Fu: Upcycling An Old Router

17 Comments

MSYS2 And The No-Fuss Way To Get More GNU Into Your Windows

30 Comments

What Happens If Russia Shuts The Door On Their Leaky ISS Module?

29 Comments

Ask Hackaday: What Ever Happened To The Hero Nerd?

178 Comments

A Brief History Of Unix Commands On Windows: CoreUtils (Again)

16 Comments

More from this category Categories Categories Select Category 3d Printer hacks Android Hacks Arduino Hacks ARM Art Artificial Intelligence Ask Hackaday ATtiny Hacks Battery Hacks Beer Hacks Biography blackberry hacks Business car hacks Cellphone Hacks chemistry hacks classic hacks clock hacks cnc hacks computer hacks cons contests cooking hacks Crowd Funding Curated Current Events Cyberdecks digital audio hacks digital cameras hacks downloads hacks drone hacks Engine Hacks Engineering Fail of the Week Featured Fiction firefox hacks FPGA g1 hacks Games google hacks gps hacks green hacks Hackaday Columns Hackaday links Hackaday Store Hackerspaces HackIt handhelds hacks hardware High Voltage History Holiday Hacks home entertainment hacks home hacks how-to Interest internet hacks Interviews iphone...

A Commodore Boombox: The 1350 as You've Never Heard It Before

Related Articles

Claude Fable 5

US Government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

The Anatomy of an AI-Native Org

Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI