Chewing on an old retrofit project and hitting a wall, so figured I’d ask here.
The machine is an ENGEL ES 3500/350 from 1985 with the CC 80 controller (built by BUHL Automatic). Program storage is still the original Philips audio cassette drive sitting in the panel, and I’d like to retire the tapes and put some kind of USB emulator or behind-the-tape-reader unit in its place.
The catch: this thing doesn’t use the usual 34-pin floppy interface, and there’s no RS232 port to fall back on either. The tape reader talks to the CPU board over a 20-pin flat ribbon cable, and my manual doesn’t have the pinout for that connector anywhere in it.
So before I start ringing out twenty wires with a meter: has anyone here retrofitted a USB emulator onto a CC 80 or another Buhl-built controller using this same 20-pin ribbon? And is there any company out there selling a plug-and-play adapter for that specific interface, or is a custom board basically the only realistic route?
Any schematics or pointers would be a big help.