One of the shortcomings of C64 was that it did not have a beeper like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. All the sound was played through TV speakers. Which is great most of the time. Except when you’re loading a program. C64 is completely silent while a program is loading. Granted, most people would go crazy listening to the sound of a Turbo tape. But occasionally, such a sound feedback would be welcome. Especially when a tape would not load for some reason (usually dirty or misaligned magnetic head of the tape drive).
While browsing through old computer magazines I came across a hack, that enables the tape-loading sound through TV speakers on demand. It’s brilliant in its simplicity and I haven’t found it anywhere else on the Internet so I’m posting it here.
You need a 100kOhm resistor which you place between a pin on Audio/Video connector and a Serial connector according to the picture below.
Whenever you want to turn on the tape-loading sound, you enter “POKE 54296,X”, where X is the desired sound volume in range 0-15.
The holes on the C64 connectors are quite big and the wires on a typical resistor are too thin to make a solid connection. So I soldered a piece of a thicker copper wire on each end so the contact is snug and stable.
This “Interface” has a feature or a bug (depends on how you look at it): If you interrupt the running program with RUN/STOP – RESTORE, you will need to reenter the POKE.