Ignorance

[airship]

I'm dumbfounded. Simply dumbfounded.

http://www.connectworld.net/cgi-bin/iec/fullpic?xFZLLwzm;L3112;10

[hydrophilic]

It's for a video cassette

[gsteemso]

What the hell is that thing really? At first glance it looks like a C64 composite video cable -- you know, 5-pin DIN at one end and 3 RCA plugs for composite video, black-and-white video and audio at the other. Then you look again and realize that it's got 6 pins arranged in an outer circle on the DIN plug (WTF? never seen that anywhere) and the three plugs are 1/8" phone plugs. Whatever that thing is, it ain't normal.

[Blacklord]

Ok, the mini-DINs could plug into the older portable style cassette player - but the other end ?

[Andrew Wiskow]

I came across a similar cable in the stock of cables I acquired from the now-defunct Civic64/128 User Group.  I, too, have no idea what it's for...  And judging from the responses here so far, no one here knows what it is either...

-Andrew

[airship]

Whatever the case may be, I think it's probably safe to say that it's not a Commodore cable of any kind.

The same site does sell a few actual Commodore cables, though.

[Andrew Wiskow]

This is just a stab in the dark... but perhaps it's for an Atari?

-Andrew

[airship]

My research indicates that the Atari cassette was actually daisy-chained to the disk drives! Weird. That's a 14-pin DIN connector. The cassette had to be the last thing in the chain, since (like Commodore serial printers) it had no second DIN connector.

I did find an old audio recorder that used a 6-pin DIN, so this cable could be an adapter for that.

Still weird. And they still don't know exactly what they're selling.

[bacon]

It looks suspiciously like a cable for an early Yamaha MIDI sequencer I have (~1984). If that's the case, the DIN plug goes into the sequencer, one phone plug is used for dumping memory to tape/recording a synch signal, one is for retrieving the memory, and one is for receiving the synch signal from tape so you can synch the sequencer to a multi-track recorder. Haven't used it for more than 20 years, but I think that's the way it worked.