Do you know what a D1 tape is? More importantly, did you happen to work with a BTS device back in the mid-1990s that was compatible with a D1 tape? If so, the documentarians working on a feature about the Canadian television show ReBoot need your help.
Let me rewind a bit first, not unlike what you can presumably do to a large D1 tape when it’s properly put into a working BTS machine. ReBoot was a Canadian animated series that first aired in 1994. Our own Natalie Zutter described the premise of the show thusly:
ReBoot’s premise is that inside your ’90s-era computer are dozens of systems that operate like cities, populated by sprites and binomes just trying to get by through system updates and the User (that’s you) dropping down game cubes for them to play. Nearly episode revolves around the User introducing a new game into Mainframe, forcing whoever gets caught up within the cube to play out the game as NPCs, rebooting into new costumes and personas, whether the scenario in question is a riff on Mad Max or Evil Dead. And if they lose? Oh, they just get transformed into melty little slugs called nulls, and that entire sector of Mainframe basically gets nuked.
The series has earned a cult following over the years, and the documentary team now has the master tapes for the show, which they plan to digitize for inclusion in the project. The problem, however, is that the D1 tapes run on now-obsolete machines. And while the team managed to find some machines than can play a D1 tape—one DCR-300 and two DCR-500 devices specifically—they’re still getting errors.
To help with their efforts, the team is putting a call out for anyone who happened to work on these machines firsthand and/or who has some manuals or other tools for them lying around. You can find their specific requests in the document they put together here.
Share with all your tech-savvy friends who might have handled such a machine a few decades ago, and let’s hope that the ReBoot documentary gets the expertise they need soon!
