Quazimodo - Cable Software

[gerryg]

Hello,
Wondering if anybody with the above game would be kind enough to upload a wav of their tape if they have one.
I recently aquired the original tape, but sadly it has loading errors. When this occurs I rerecord the tape and then splice the recorded version into the original tape. This has actually worked out very well, as it is the only way to retain the authentic original tape.

There is indeed a version of the above in the archives on World of Dragon, however it seems slightly different to my original, and I realise this is a little pedantic, but mine has a loading screen while waiting for the game to complete loading, and the WoD wav file does not. Ideally, I'd like to get my hands on a wav. that has the loading screen inbuilt to fully recreate the original tape.

Would be delighted if somebody had such version that they might upload the wav. of.

Many thanks in advance.

[robcfg]

Could you upload a wav file of your own even if it doesn't work?

[gerryg]

I certainly can. I'll pull one off it tomorrow and upload.

[robcfg]

Thanks a lot!

[gerryg]

As requested

[gerryg]

And another - with lower gain on recording

[sixxie]

This is my "feels like it works" fix for that image. Here was my bodgy approach:

Used Audacity to zoom into the waveform at the point loading failed in XRoar. Spotted areas where the wave didn't cross zero, selected those portions and applied normalize filter with remove DC offset checked.

When I'd done enough and it loaded, I compared a post-load RAM dump (using -snap-motoroff in XRoar) with the archive copy to make sure it looked basically the same.

Then ran the end result through XRoar's tape rewrite function to make a "clean" version.

I'm not sure what the deal is with the loader bombing out with ?SN ERROR, but the inlay scans note that it's expected. On what machines do they reckon that ever worked, I wonder? Not Dragon 64, not Dragon 32, not Dragon 32 configured to only have 16K...

Edit: hah! If I start XRoar with -ram-init clear (might not be in released version yet, can't remember), it loads fine! So the loader depends on some bit of RAM being initialised in some particular way.

[gerryg]

Thank you very much, and for explaining what it is you did.
Just last night I would Robcfg's DragonCAS tool and I began to try look at the file.
I had known from trying that the file stopped roughly around 1m04 seconds with errors, and started looking at the signal degradation there.
However, I'm afraid I'm a complete novice as to to Dragon tape structures, and it has been something of a steep learning curve over lunchtime today at work trying to make sense of it all.
From my second wav (lower gain one) that I posted here earlier, I could not get DragonCAS to recognise it at all, but aftewr doing some fiddling, I now have the name and the first 3 blocks of data being decoded correctly. It was going to be looking a very long process to complete out the file, which (in my limited knowledge of the process) was surprising, as my wav was loading up until about 1.04, as you rightly pointed out in your examination.
Then I got to thinking that if I could just fix that portion I might get it all working, and be able to rerecord the tape. Now, thanks to your efforts I can do so.

What I am going to do though, in the interests of improving my understanding, is take a look at and try your methodology that clearly worked, and try replicate it myself. I have a number of other tapes where I might learn something from.

Might I ask you what settings you used to save the WAV file (and was it generated via Xroar, or through audacity?), as I note the very slim size your attachment was in comparison to my huge file I initially posted.

Thank you very much again, and I apologise for my lack of knowledge on this topic, and trust you'll forgive the novice questions.

Sincerely,
Ger

[gerryg]

When I rerecorded the WoD archive copy, the game worked flawlessly, and I did indeed get the ?SN error, which, as you noted, is expected.
The differences I found between my tape, and archive were..

1. Name Block - mine says QUAZIMOD - the archive is QUAZI
2. No first loading splash screen
3. No second loading screen

However, the game played exactly the same. I was just being a little pedantic in trying to get the exact version that was initially on the tape back on to it.

Thanks again.

[sixxie]

Might I ask you what settings you used to save the WAV file (and was it generated via Xroar, or through audacity?), as I note the very slim size your attachment was in comparison to my huge file I initially posted.

Yeah through XRoar. The tape rewrite feature adds ROM call intercepts to rewrite cleaned up data, consistent leader and gap lengths, etc.

In this case I rewrote it as a CAS file then just used cas2wav to generate the WAV, but XRoar can write the WAV directly if you want.