Recently [Throaty Mumbo] took a poke at another daft idea, in the form of loading Sega Genesis games off vinyl records. Although a whacky idea, it’s made possible through the use of a Mega Everdrive Pro and its ability to load games via its USB port, a feature mostly intended for on-the-fly game development without swapping SD cards.

For a few decades in home computing, the loading of software from cassette tapes and similar media was very common. This was due to the low-cost nature of this ubiquitous technology compared to alternatives like cartridges and floppy disks. Even if it was famously unreliable and slow, this accessibility made it a very popular choice. This is where home game consoles were different, as they generally used very fast cartridges, but what if you merge these two worlds?

As demonstrated, a Pico 2 board with its RP2350 MCU is used to convert the audio signal containing the binary data into data for transmission via USB to the Everdrive cartridge. After confirming that it works with a tape drive, he drags in a plastic-y PO-80 5″ record cutter and player, where the mono audio limitation is not a problem.

...read more at hackaday.com