MS Basic 1.0 Tape Loading

[Jim Sturges]

Hi.

I have the AltairDuino that is before the current models (with the printed blue case, no expansions).

I plan to make my own tape reader, but wondered if anyone has experience connecting one to the Altair-Duino.  I'm a maker-type so printing a reader is no biggie.  I figure I can guess the encoding when I get my Basic 10 tape from ebay.

My question is this: I can see how easy it would be to do a strictly electrical path from tape to the front-panel switches and do a load that way, but I assume the tape will be in ASCII or something (I'm 57, so I'm used to a lot of the old stuff), so will just do arduino logic to go from the bit pattern to serial (I guess? into the Altair) - but then, there would be a bootloader required.  I have the PDP10 emulator as well, and from watching videos, it appears that you would just start the tape loading and it would load byte-by-byte into memory.

If anybody else has done this with the older Altair-Duino, I'd love your thoughts.

Jim

[Chris Davis]

If you're going to load the version of BASIC 1.0 that I sell on eBay, you will want to examine this project: https://github.com/dhansel/PaperTapeReader

This version of BASIC assumes you are reading the data from an 88-SIO serial port at I/O address 0/1.  It also assumes you are loading from the same serial port where the terminal resides.  David's project has a pass-through connection like this Serial Terminal -> Tape Reader -> Altair.

[Chris Davis]

I guess I should say the bootloader included with the tape assumes the terminal and tape reader are on the same serial port.  You can rewrite your own bootloader (source is provided).

[Jim Sturges]

Thanks for the info!

I saw the reader on thingiverse.com.  I haven't decided to go with modern stuff (optical, controls) or old-school with a solenoid and contacts.  I guess since I'm going serial port, the best way would be to have an Arduino-based reader that passes the terminal through.  Once you've done that, I suppose getting more fancy makes sense (stepper/servo, buttons, etc.).

Anyhow, thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

[Jim Sturges]

Also, super thanks for making the tapes available!!!  How many got trashed over the years??

I saw the video of CuriousMarc loading [I assume this tape] on a working Altair.  Made me lust for it.

On Sunday, October 5, 2025 at 2:01:48 PM UTC-4 famousd...@gmail.com wrote: