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#nofilesystem

Amin Girasolfluidlogic@oldbytes.space
2024-02-04

a8cas-convert is often great, but I'm finding #Altirra does a more reliable job of successfully turning (ancient) eight-bit data tape audio into a successfully loaded program.

Looks like a8cas-convert has been effectively abandoned since 2015: a8cas.sourceforge.net/news.htm

#Atari800 #Atari8bit #DataCassette #Atari410 #BinaryDump #NoFilesystem

A screenshot of the Altirra Atari 8-bit emulator running in Wine on Xubuntu. It's displaying the cassette waveform window and a screenful of a successfully CLOADed program listing.A terminal window on Linux showing an invocation of `a8cas-convert`, which fails on the last block.
Amin Girasolfluidlogic@oldbytes.space
2024-01-28

Trying to recover more programs from #cassette tapes recorded with the #Atari #program #recorder in the early 1980s. Type-a-tune doesn't seem to be recoverable. Look at that drop-out! #a8cas-convert can't turn the audio into a valid CAS file either.

Just 12 milliseconds of data are missing, but that makes this #program unrecoverable.

I learned to #CSAVE a program twice in succession after getting caught out like this a few times.

#retrocomputing #datacassette #nofilesystem #binarydump

A screenshot of the program Audacity displaying both waveform and spectrogram for about 300 milliseconds of audio representing binary data. There's a dropout of just 12 milliseconds where the amplitude of the wave drops to zero, meaning no data is discernable.A screenshot of the Altirra 8-bit Atari emulator running under Wine on Xubuntu Linux. The Atari display shows "ERROR - 143 AT LINE 0" and Altirra's "Cassette Tape Control" window shows the tape stopped after the sixth data block.A screenshot of a terminal in Linux showing `a8cas-convert` finding two blocks containing errors. This is followed by the output of the `cat` command on the resulting CAS file; the name of the program in its tokenized BASIC form can be discerned; the program is TYPE-A-TUNE, which turned a row of the Atari's keyboard into a piano keyboard. Neither Altirra nor Linux's atari800 can successfully load the cassette in this format. (Though I've had excellent success with `a8cas-convert` on other programs on this same tape.)

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