Fixing the We are Stardust game (Lukhash tape)

We Are Stardust is an album by Lukhash, relased by NewRetroWave digitally and on several physical formats:

Besides it being a very good synthwave and chiptune influenced album, the cool thing about it is that it includes a Commodore 64 game as bonus track, which in case of the cassette tape release is directly loadable on the C64 with a 1530 datasette. It depends on the condition and head alignment of you datasette of course. Mine for some reason was unable to load the game (printed garbage as the game title when finding the game).

So I fixed it the following way:

I have a 1530USB adapter that acts as a USB sound card with a connector for the 1530 and can connect the original datasette via USB to any computer. Then one can use Audacity, Audiotap and Final TAP to backup, fix and rerecord the tapes.

I recorded the audio from the original tape with Audacity, converted the wav file to .tap with Audiotap, used Final TAP on the tap file to clean and optimize it, then recorded back the tap file to the cassette. It took me several tries to make the whole thing work. Luckily the support forum on load64.com helped. Disabling the sound enhancements and spatial audio in the Windows audio properties and setting the output volume to 80 when recording solved the issue I was having.

Also as I had the "Inverted waveform" enabled when converting the wav to tap, I had to leave the "Inverted waveform" checkbox unchecked when recording back the tap file. The whole inversion thing is needed because the C64 expects a specific polarity and Audiotap needs to know which side of the transition is the pulse. Many PC sound cards might invert it by default when recording. So if you recorded the wav and converted it to tap with inverted waveform enabled, then you need to write it back without setting the inverted waveform again.

Now the game loads fine and it's so cool. It's a rhythm runner for a music originally made by Lukhash and convertd to SID by Magnar Harestad. The goal of the player is to find the right rhythm to dodge obstacles and gain as many points as he can. At the end you get a QR code dispayed on the screen, which can be used to share your high-score.

If you just want to try the game, it is downloadable in a .d64 format from itch.io for free:

But if you have a tape that's not working with your datasette or you accidentally messed something up and want to rerecord it, here is the tap file cleaned with Final TAP, that worked for me: