In my previous post I introduced the Tapecart, a thumb drive for the Commodore 64, and built one of those. The only major issue with these great devices is the 1.5 hours it takes for the C64 to transfer the 2 MB of data to them.

Fortunately, Detlef Gerhardt came up with the idea of hooking up the Tapecart to an Arduino in order to transfer the data using a modern PC. It turns out, this speeds up the transfer considerably and it also eliminates the need for copying TCRT images using a SD2IEC or similar device. An early version of Detlef’s TapecartFlasher software is available on Github.

Tapecart and the Arduino. Ignore all the other components for now.

The original setup for the TapecartFlasher is as simple as it gets: simply hook up 5V and GND from the Arduino, then connect the 4 remaining lines of the cassette port interface to D2-D5. I tried this on a breadboard first and it worked out of the box! The most complicated part here was the lack of a proper connector, so I just soldered leads to the Tapecart module. Continue reading →