Smallest endless loop cart - Bandai Micro Cartridge
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- čas přidán 6. 10. 2023
- The smallest music tape cart format in the world, ever...probably.
FAQ
Q) Dimensions?
A) The Bandai cart measures 33mm x 28mm x 10mm
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Just when you thought there were no more oddball consumer audio formats left....!
There are always more.
Never underestimate The Techmoan!
He's mentioned this one before, alongside the elvis and miniature jukebox details.
Be careful. Every time someone thinks there are no weird formats left, a new one is invented 40 years in the past.
Hahahaha, I don’t even think like that anymore 😂 now it’s like, there must be around 30 more somewhere in india and africa or japan and who knows where../
Techmoan, I actually have a third novelty item that used these cartridges. It's called The Magnificent Gramophone Micro-Cassette Musical and was released by Enesco in 1987. It comes with two cartridges: "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" and "Chattanooga Choo-Choo." If I remember correctly, my dad bought it from QVC in the late '80s. If you are interested in looking at it, please let me know.
QVC...now that brings back memories, late night after some sky channel as a kid this came on and I loved watching it just to see what novelties they were selling that day.
His name is Mat 😊
This
Oh wait, you're not even joking. Wow, this would be great!
@@CableWrestler His name is Techmoan 😊
Being in the recording business, I developed a reputation for being able to repair cassette and 8-Track tapes. Back in 1986, I had a client bring me an endless loop tape cartridge for repair. It was from an early word processor (Smith-Corona?) and he was a professional writer. The cartridge was about the size of a credit card and 1/8" tall and the tape had become snarled. The tape had a height of about 1/32". Fortunately, he brought a sacrificial cartridge and I was able to salvage his approximately 60 pages of work. It took me about three hours to get it spliced and wound to correct tension. I hate endless loop cartridges. They are a self destruct mechanism.
I vaguely recall seeing those when I was a teenager. There was a chain of shops called 'Wilding Office Equipment' who used to sell some quite funky equipment and those early cartridge based word processors were a more affordable machine than the IBM type machines that were around in the early 80s. However once Amstrad released their 8256 Word Processor for £400, that spelt the beginning of the end for the older technology (in the UK at least). By the time I left school and was at college in 1987 those Amstrad machines were everywhere and presumably home word processing on machines like the Atari ST and possibly even the Commodore 64 had become more widespread.
Some sort of "stringy floppy" or "wafer tape" drive.
@@KronoGarrett Actually, it was a really skinny mechanism set up exactly like an 8-Track cartridge. About 25% in all dimensions.
Couldn't agree more. Endless tape loops have always seemed like a bad idea that barely worked (...for now.) I get the desire for it to exist, but very few implementations seemed like anything more than a temporarily successful fluke.
@@nickwallette6201 a lot of toys had endless tape loops. I had a toy dalek when I was a kid in the 70s and if you pushed a button on it it would shriek out one of several sentences. I suspect the talking teddy ruxpin toy of the 80s also had some kind of tape system built within.
Mat, I know you regularly say your ability to fix such devices is limited, but anything you do looks like magic to someone like me whose electrical skill doesn’t stretch beyond changing a lightbulb.
I love the one a few months ago when he lost the part but later found it stuck to his elbow. We have all been there at some point lol.
He has such professionalism and calm attributes he demonstrates on his repair videos.......However, behind the scenes he goes berserk! Slamming his fists all over these impossible boxes, slamming his head against the wall in pure anger! I know I would! he pretends to have the patience of a saint 😂
Wait, you know how to change your own lightbulbs?!
I was half expecting he would reverse the process and create some carts with modern music to play. Hearing "Black Hole Sun" or some such on this tiny jukebox would be a hoot
@spiff2268 Doesn't changing a bulb require two people? One to hold the bulb and another to spin the ladder?
Greetings from Texas. Those smaller tapes were also used in a line of Melody In Motion ceramic moving large figurines. They were available in the late 80s and 90s. Enjoy your videos.
I don't think those use the Bandai cartridges...
I appreciate how the little record in the display window is seemingly run on a shaft that connects straight through to the pulley for the tape mechanism. Quite ingenious!
Would a reduction gear have been too much to ask? Probably. :-) But it would've been nice.
Yes! Tiny, obscure physical media format! 😊
🤣🤣 yes! the smaller and more obscure the better, and this is hard to beat. we love it.
.
My next album is only going to be released on Bandai micro-cartridges!!
Its an 8 track for Barbie's 70s Dream Car.
I was going to say that !
Blasting Barbie girl
@ThePapaja1996 I don't think Ken would like you to blast her. Well, he did in my stop-motion porno with my sisters Barbie. Barbie was well up for it, so, maybe?
@@ThePapaja1996About a decade too early for that song.
For owners of 'Mico Machines' cars, who have been dying for a decent audio install for years 😅😊
🚗 🔍 📻 🔊
For someone who's not a trained presenter you are very good. Would be a perfect edition to the Tomorrow's World presenters.
Decided to have a putt around on the Japanese side of the internet because I speak a decent amount. I haven’t found another product Bandai used this micro cartridge in, but I found a product called Bandai little jammers that might interest you. They run on digital cartridges, But it’s similar to the Elvis product but with an entire band of musicians playing a range of different songs. Back on the hunt for these specific cartridges though. There’s even a peanuts cartoon crossover version.
There must have been some Bandai toy similar to the american toys that used that cartridge. The problem is there is no full documentation of all bandai toys online. It might have been so niche it only sold for a year or two or it was used as a price in crane machines.
Bandai fulfilled many of my childhood (and adulthood) dreams.
And as Bandai Namco, a lot of my adolescent too.
For those 'Micro Machine' car owners who have been dying for decent car audio...😮
I owned one of these. As a child I was a fan of this style music. I WISH I could recall the year it came out, but It cost 100usd, and included 2 tapes. The other tapes could be mail-ordered. I bought the rest of the produced lot. There's about 12 or so tapes made, and I still own mine, so I'd need to check.
Its a cute novelty, and this one is absolute a full on novelty-from the plasticky construction to the loose wires and the dodgy tapes, but the fact it still *kinda* works after all these years is still quite impressive. Always love seeing your display of vintage music formats and other historical tech.
Hello Mat! Years ago I wrote a comment on your CZcams channel, in it I let you know how much your videos were improving to a professional level and how much I liked them, you answered me telling me it probably was the best comment you have ever received. Well many years later I still watch your videos with great interest and love, and over time I have grown to love them even more, we'll wait till the weekend comes and gather around the TV with coffee and sandwiches to watch your new video; You have over a million subscribers now, but the way I see it you should have 10 million. Your videos fill me with such a warm feeling and good vibes that I fear a little the time when you'd decide to retire and stop making them. Me and my sons really enjoy your channel. Keep up the excellent work and don't ever stop, please. Take care old chap!
Nice! It is funny I could easily recognize the song "Tequila" when it was initially playing backwards.
Never fails to amaze me how many tape formats there are...
Since its using standard tape, I suppose if you were feeling truly masochistic you could record those songs from another source onto a bit of new tape and spool them onto the old cassettes 😄
yes, but to do it correctly, you would need to find a full track mono cassette head, or a 2-track auto-reverse head could be wired to get pretty much the same result.
Then, since back coated cassette tape is probably not a thing, silicone-based tape lube(which WAS, and likely still is), a thing),could be used to get the tape moving properly.
The problem with this plan is that the tape needs the appropriate lubricant - regular tape would just jam.
I did an experiment in the 1990s. I packed a bunch of standard quarter-inch tape from a reel into an 8-track cartridge. It jammed-up really bad. You [!]NEED[!] that coating on the back of the tape!
Probably overthinking it, but is there any label difference between the ones who play it at normal volume and the ones who are too quiet? I wonder if the ones they'd sell specifically to that model were mastered louder because of no volume controls, but the others were for other devices (or a later/earlier model that had a volume knob) and so could be mastered in a more sensible way.
could just be a matter of which record label they originate from. There are massive volume differences on CDs from the 80s as well, and it largely depends on where they were recorded originally
It's mainly worn/disintegrating pressure pad in the cartridge. Results in the tape only partially, or not contacting the head.
Nothing makes a Saturday morning shine like hearing Tequila played backwards!
9:15 10:00 I notice that some of those tapes have a JASRAC logo, so they were licensed in Japan.
I love how you’re able to find and fix all these old bits of tech we’ve never heard of!
Great video!
This makes me wonder how many memory cards these days aren't using proper carbon-coated bits, and the 1s and 0s will just start sticking to each other in a couple of decades.
Well.. most flash memory will experience bit rot if not energized after a while. So there's something to look forward in 40 years.
A video I saw about paintings, that about 5% of the world's ancient art will be gone in next 100 years. As even the most expensive materials still gonna fall apart, which all are already doing
The only endless tape cartridge I've touched was the Sinclair Microdrive. But those were so short they made a complete loop in just a few seconds. To achieve this they were not using a spool whatsoever, but the tape was just flopping around inside the shell. If I remember correctly they were spliced into a Möbius loop. That is it was twisted half around so it could be recorded on both sides by running two laps. But I might be wrong about that part. The cartridges were interesting as the tape tended to stretch with use. This could corrupt stored data, but once it had stretched it was pretty stable. Nominal capacity was 100 KB, well that is if I remember correctly, at least. But after some use it would store up to 110 KB. I wrote a program that just formatted the tape repeatedly, and once it ran four loops and got the same capacity it stopped. I ran hundreds of cartridges through that.
The cartridges were tiny and people complained over them being so small they got lost. These drives were as far as I know only used with the Microdrive for the ZX Spectrum, the Sinclair QL, and the ICL One Per Desk.
Now that last is a device I'd love to see on this channel. I actually had one when I worked on ICL. It was both terrible and brilliant in a weird mix.
And likely the Sinclair Microdrive cartridges prove that this video does not show the "smallest endless loop cart", yet it still might be the smallest endless *audio* loop cart, though.
@@tw11tube I've got a Sinclair Microdrive somewhere ... the cartridges are small but I would say slightly bigger than the audio carts in this video.
I still have a Microdrive and some cartridges. They were small but a little bigger than these audio cartridges but used tape half the width of normal cassette tape so thinner. BTW the idea of just allowing tape to pile up rather than spool seems to come from the "full sized" computer industry. I'm sure I've seen video of magnetic computer tape and also punched paper tape being used in a similar way.
The microdrive carts had 15m of tape if I remember correctly, pulled at an impressive 2m per second, so, yes, reading the whole cart in 7.5 seconds. I think the data capacity was about 80K.
The looks of this device was definitely the selling point. I can see this looking great on somebody's mantle shelf.
Your videos are often so helpful to me. I have a hobby of copying old cassettes to CD or USB stick for friends. I had not heard about the carbon backing that prevents the tape getting stuck together.
Lots of 70’s and 80’s reel-to-reel tapes were also backcoated, the earlier 50’s/60’s tapes usually are not.
Strange thing is that especially those backcoated ones are often ‘sticky’ due to binder problems whereas the older 50/60’s tapes play fine
Ampex 456 is a disaster but the older ampex 641 play fine 😁
Hey Techmoan! That Tom Petty 8-Track was how I first heard “Damn The Torpedoes”!
Cheap as it may have been, that's a rather cute little trinket to have. I quite appreciated the design of it, at least, in a visual sense.
Yes this is the kinda stuff I go to this channel for :D
I had an answering machine that I purchased from RadioShack circa 1990. It used a looping microcassette for the answering message, and a standard microcassette for holding the messages. As I recall, the message cassettes were available in 20 sec., 30 sec., and 1 minute lengths.
a lot of answering machines from the 80s used looping tape. We had one that used them to record the messages as well, so once it'd gone all the way around it'd start recording over the oldest messages, so you'd better hope you didn't get a lot of messages before you had a chance to listen to them
For somone who grow up in the 70s 80s etc i stil like the old items what ever they are and i have som collection like nostalgicka...so when i watch your videos it is like travel back in time....people ask why do you collect that old items well i like them and for me they never get old...Thanks for taking me back in time Great videos...Greatings from a cold icy sweden..sorry for bad speling and gramma...
Fascinating! There were endless loop cassettes for answering machines, but of course they used the much larger regular cassette cases. Never knew about these. Thanks for sharing!
when i watch your videos, your words in a past video "i'm not a professional or anything, i just like fixing things" stay in my mind. i'd argue that after this many repairs and niche abilities to fix old tech like you do makes you a professional in your own rite
I missed your videos over the last few weekends.
Hope all is well and of course you never disappoint.
This one was quite entertaining and I remember these devices I just never knew how they worked nor did I ever own one…. so thanks Matt keep them coming and as always thanks for reading. 😊
Crazy how small that is
That's what she said
It really sounded like a tape head dirty or misalignment perhaps... especially considering the cheap nature of it.... great video as always! 🍻🌎♥️🎶🕺
I find it hard to believe they engineered that cartridge just for these two cheap novelty items. I'm really curious what other players are out there for this format.
Endless loop microcassettes are widely used in voice transcriptions, word processing and telecommunications in the 1970s and 1980s before the advent of digital audio.
Why is that hard to believe? More engineering went into designing and manufacturing the small wurlitzer jukebox replica that played the tapes than the cartridge. There isn't anything revolutionary about the cartridge as Techmoan pointed out. It's using established ideas just in a small cartridge.
I remember when these were new in the store in the 80's. I collect real jukeboxes and thought it was neat because some level of car was actually put into making it look like a 1015
I'm old enough to remember a lot of the technology you demonstrate but I really appreciate seeing the items I was never aware of. Thanks!
We were so expecting you in Patagonia Argentina. You are amazing!!!.Gracias.
me and my uncle love your videos i have learnt alot about different tech because of your channel
It’s just super impressive… to boil down a cassette the the bear minimum like that and still have it work, especially for a novelty item like this… great stuff!
I wouldn’t obsess about the capacitors. Just because they are getting on doesn’t mean they need replacement and short of them visually leaking the only way forward is to test them. I’m thinking this might make more of a novelty Bluetooth speaker than anything else so that’s one possible project for this as it seems it’s cart playing days are numbered.
Interesting video, as always. Have you ever looked at the doll “voice boxes” that use a miniature plastic record? The kind that they used to put in Action Man figures etc.
Found a plastic record inside a toy robot; which used it to speak at intervals.
I'm pretty sure he did one of these a while back. Have a look through the catalogue.
@@grndkntrl I thought he had, but couldn’t find it
Yes he covered those a while back. I think the video was called ‘The world’s smallest record player’ or something like that.
czcams.com/video/mzWaj_vDKBM/video.html
Well, it sounds better than the miniature records. The sound that made just made me laugh 😂
In Germany in my childhood, you could buy a gadget called a "Lachsack" (laughing bag). I think that was the only sound that the mini-record players could adequately reproduce ...
Amazing review love you're work love unusual tech ❤
I never thought I had any personal triggers until you ran your fingers across that tape... It probably says a lot about the excellent mics you use. Thanks for the always quality content, even if it hurt me spiritually 😂
Ah Saturday, Beans on Toast with the family and a Techmoan Video
And just when I think you've probably covered all the old obscure media formats or/and form factors out there, you've managed to find and show us yet one more; nice work, chap!
You finally got one! Been watching you show pictures of it forever. Nice.
I have one of these since I bought it new back in the 80’s. I received the same tapes with it. As in the video only two of the tapes still play. Thanks to this video i now know why.
I was given the elvis doll with cartridges by my uncle affer his business trip to the USA. It wax ok but hmm me being me wanted to know how it worked. Learned a lot and for a change, got it back in one piece and ‘working’ no idea what happened to it though. Lost in house moved i suspect.
Always a good weekend start with Techmoan!
Amazing video. Thanks man.
Things to do: Refill the carts with new tape/songs. Replace the incandescent lights with a multicolor LED strip. Add an AUX jack to output to a better amp.
And once again, following a new Techmoan video, the universe folds, history unravels and rewrites itself so that another obscure niche audio format exists to be covered in the next video.
Omg, that sony cassette player you use! my father had two of those and I have fond memories of getting my first recording experience with them as a kid. It's an off topic comment but it just made me so happy to see that again
Thanks for posting, as always. :)
Always interesting and informative ❤
The volume level is probably the decay of the sponge pads, the Sinclair Micro-drive cartridges suffer from this...
And you can fix bound up microdrives by heating them with a hairdryer or on a radio. Which seemed to be the two issues he was having
Thanks for sharing.
I'm excited now to start looking in hopes they made a micro Echoplex! Always enjoy the hard research you bring to your show as well as the repair skills, keep on Moan-ing Techie!
The selections of songs are absolutely perfect and I love the look. If someone made a "jukebox" MP3 player like that filled with 100+ tracks from the 1950s, it would be "shut up and take my money" time.
Well if nothing else it looks about perfect scale for his puppetry 😊
It looks adorable!!!!!!!!!!
It's a perfect size for the world's smallest violin music.
Oh yeah, it is cool that we can see some cool lighting effect on this jukebox when we dim the room lights (or at least better than we already could).
Wow, those tapes are definitely amazingly small!
LOVE it! They're so cute. It amazes me how much work goes into making such mediocre products. Its really a niche of it's own.
You always add some nice information. Nice!
Wurlitzer manufactured right down the street from me in North Tonawanda NY. The building is now an event hall and looks awesome
A family friend had one of these. I was fascinated by it as a kid.
I’ve been watching Techmoan for years and this is the first time ever I’m the first viewer!! (Well, apart from all the Patreon viewers of course).
This will of course impress no one 😂
impresses me ! Same as red letter media, I've been first a few times and now it's a thing " First " ! Lol😅
I’m impressed. I had the same experience on a different CZcams channel recently.
@@padraigcollins6525 it's the small things in life that make our day !
I get ya! I make a bigger deal out of being any of the record speeds...
'Hey I'm the 16th/33rd/45th/78th like', etc.
A cup of tea and TechMoan and it’s a great start to the weekend.
I do wonder if you could record other music on those tapes and then play them on the jukebox?
Love your videos 🎉
Perhaps a deeper investigation into the recording method used on the ribbon of the tape cartridges is in order. Say: Seeing if it was mono, stereo, or 4-channel--like that used on the ubiquitous tapes meant for the cassette-based model of the 2-XL. Once done, seeing how you have an abundance of "spare" copies of certain titles for that player, perhaps it'd be an amusing project to re-spool one or two with brand-new cassette tape ribbon, that upon which you've recorded music or some general audio of your choice, OP...!😉
Thanks Matt, great video. :)
good show. thank you
Im glad to see you working on the mini jukebox, my grandparents have one and i wanted to play with it but non of the tapes work.
You seem to have the only information on the internet I can find on this format. Further proof you are preserving history that has been otherwise forgotten.
Ha, I love these experiments that you do, of transferring tapes from one form factor of player to another!
Well, whattya know? This is 1 7/8 IPS too, just as I suspected!
The way you dashed that last cartridge to the side so nonchalantly was pretty darn funny!🤣
Many thanks 🙂🇮🇪☘️💚
I'd love one of these machines and some chewed up tapes, just for the sake of putting whatever music I'd like. Imagine a cheap toy Wurlitzer playing some thrash metal!
More than welcome to recap it and see what else can be done! Could add it to my channel as another retro repair!
I got one of those jukeboxes - it was sold in Sweden, in some novelty shop or other.
I had one of these when I was a kid in the 90s!
If I recall correctly, Bandai made an answering machine for these first where the ``song tape'' used in other devices was usedas the outgoing message, because just like the guy below who rescued his customer's typing on a ``prehistoric'' word processor - I had a similar experience with a guy's father's half-a-dozen or so outgoing message tapes he wanted to use as a gag.
Of course I did exactly what you did and spooled the tape onto a normal cassette shell and played it back that way, but the only full-track head I was able to find, came in an old museum diorama model endless loop deck using a completely DIFFERENT cartridge which was similar to the two-cassette versions of the Language Lab decks we had in school where the playback-only side operated separately from the record side.
These could record from a built-in mini/Living Letters type capstan reel to reel or through an external source where presumably engineers would record several copies and then with cartridges being scarce
empty one out when it got worn through or jammed and then reloading another copy through something I would imagine being akin to a cart-winder which every radio station had by the handful.
I'm guessing there was a period after the newer ones came out where people would mistakenly erase the training track when attempting to lay down their practice exercises - because the ones after that at our school were using the same 4-hole configuration used next on e g Teddy Ruxpin dolls and finally to indicate Type IV (Metal) cassettes.
So since I wasn't getting real terrific sound out of the normal Marantz I was using, I tried it first in a modified Child Guidance/Worlds of Wonder Talk N Play where the 4 individual tracks were each fed to their own amp (my Marantz quadraphonic set) and recorded into the computer that way provided acceptable enough results til I could find my old full-track mono museum diorama player which proved superior.
You can still get graphite-lubricated cassette tape on a hub if you look hard enough, so when people bring me these or something similar to re-record the songs onto fresh tape and wind them back into the cart, I always buy the lube tape in whatever width I can find it whenever I do - record them onto the 3-3/4 IPS standard 1.5 mil 3-inch reel and then play THAT back on one side of the diorama player and record the cartridge anew on the other side.
Pocket rockers and other 2-track or 4-track cartridges for 1/8 inch tape are re-done in a normal cassette deck as you do from a DAW with the program reversed prior to recording.
As usual - more fun watching/listening to you perform with these technologies than doing it myself (in and out of burnout) Have fun.
It's officially Saturday. @techmoan post.
I couldn't stop laughing at "Backwards Tequila".
¡¡¡¡Aliuqet!!!!
5:45 follow the speaker wires to the traces, youll find a resistor or diode, paired usually with a .1 uf or .47 uf capacitor in series, thats your dc blocking and volume, can use a simple emitter follower using a resistor and a potentiometer or a 3.3v zener and potentiometer would work
Too bad they didn't make novelty mini 8 track players that used this cartridge, then the tape problems would be part of the whole point haha
GREAT I LIKE IT
8:42 RIP Paul Rubens😢
I never thought I need to listen to a demotic version of Tequila but here we are.
Techmoan, those long sideburns are a total give away! Also that late 70's costume.
I had a "Say it, Play it". I think marketed around the early 1970's. It also used a small micro endless loop cartridge. It used pretty much the same technology. I remember looking at Dime stores for tape cartridges that had the most tape in them. I think I had one that actually ran for about 3.5 minutes. It ran at cassette speed to by knowledge. Audio quality was horrible, but it was very fun to play with as a kid in the early 1970's.
Very interesting thank you for the upload
Sweet !
Great video!
I have one with exactly the same body as this except that it takes standard cassette tapes. The record does not spin but the lights work around the front. Purchased late 80's.