Use Any Tape Recorder With Atari?

I am a new owner of an Atari 800. I eventually plan to purchase a disk drive, but as a temporary storage device, I would like to use my Panasonic cassette recorder, rather than purchase an Atari 410 or 1010 program recorder. Is this possible? If so, how do I go about wiring connections without causing any damage to the computer?

Mark Inman

The serial plug used to connect Atari peripherals has connections for audio out and audio in. You can attach a standard recorder to audio out and record CSAVEs, but there is no way to get the computer to read the audio-in line (which is used to play the audio track through the TV speaker). The Atari 410 recorder has a special analog to digital circuit used to translate tape tones into digital information that the computer can read.