New release for DOOM + DOOM 2 and copying Commodore 64 cassettes to TAP

Weekends are a great time to kick back with some gaming, but with the UK weather being so uncharacteristically good right now, it’s a bit of a quadary.

Portable gaming systems that run retro games - like the Nintendo Switch, for example - are great options. Way back in 1990, around this time of year, I bought the C64 copy of Turrican. Combining both of these topics, this weekend’s newsletter features a review of Turrican Flashback on the Nintendo Switch.

We’ve also got a ton of breaking news from QuakeCon concerning a new release of DOOM.

Table of Contents

• How to convert Commodore 64 cassettes to TAP files …

  • Linux Format

  • The mystery of missing cassettes

• Turrican Flashback review

  • Turrican Isn’t the Same on Emulators

  • Turrican Flashback: Making Retro Gaming Playable

  • Controlling Turrican Flashback

• Loads of DOOM news

• Game Over

How to convert Commodore 64 cassettes to TAP files on Linux

Copying Commodore 64 cassettes to my PC pretty much covers what I’ve been doing over the past few months.

A cursory glance at my C64 collection revealed I have a third as many “blank” cassettes – that is, shop-bought cassettes optimized for data – as I have published games on the same medium. These files represent a big chunk of my early computing, and include graphic files, game projects on SEUCK and Graphic Adventure Creator, and type-ins in various stages of completion.

To begin the process of copying the cassettes, I spent some money on a device called the 1530USB. This is an adapter that acts as an interface between the Commodore 1530 C2N Datasette (which typically shipped with a Commodore 64) and my PC’s USB port.