Don’t Copy That Floppy (Copy That Tape Instead)
Commodore never made a dual-deck Datasette drive, but Jan Derogee built one so that you can copy tapes in style, like it's 1983.
In the early days of the home computing era, there was a lot of concern that the practice of copying disks to “share” software would bring the world to a screeching halt. These worries led to gems (in retrospect) like the Don't Copy That Floppy ad campaign. Seriously, if you are not familiar with “MC Double Def DP,” you need to look up a video right now. I’ll wait here.
Amazing, right? I mean in a terrible, cringey sort of way, of course, but something that is definitely not to be missed. As we now know, the world did not come to an end because someone gave a friend a copy of Impossible Mission. But due to the worries of the day, you would hardly expect a major computer manufacturer to market a device designed to make it easier to copy software. And that is likely why Jan Derogee’s double-deck 1560 Datasette drive was never actually made by Commodore, despite the fact that people would obviously have wanted it back in the day.
Derogee’s 1560 Datasette may be about 40 years late to the party, but if you have a stack of cassette tapes to copy (why?!?), it might be exactly what you are looking for. Sure, you could bust out your old boombox to make copies, but that will not work any better than it did back when you were making all of those sketchy copies of Prince of Persia. Since they are not designed for recording data, these makeshift solutions were always notorious for their weak and noisy signals that often led to loading errors.
The drive is made of two official Commodore 1530 Datasette drives. The originals were in a broken state, but with some work, Derogee got them back in service. After that, it was a matter of fitting the components into a custom-ish case that merged two 1530 cases together, wiring everything up, and adding a switch to control the function of the drives, depending on what the user wants to accomplish — aside from making copies, the drives can also perform the usual LOAD/SAVE operations when attached to a computer, if put into the proper mode of operation.
There are some simpler and less expensive ways to accomplish the same thing as the 1560 Datasette drive (and without damaging original cases), but they lack the style of Derogee’s Commodore drive that never quite existed. So if you want to copy that…err…tape like it’s 1983, there may be no better way to go than Derogee’s 1530 Datasette.
