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daelectron wrote:I think the cassettes were recorded on the same cassette recorder

Probably they have, but they sound like they have been recorded from one cassette recorder to another which has produced poor quality recordings. It is possible that someone may be able to rescue one or both of the files, but fresh copies recorded direct from your Dragon to cassette tape would have been the easiest way.

I do agree.

Anyway, I'm managing to decode the blocks, but there are a lot of them and my method requires a lot of human intervention because humans are still much better than computers at pattern matching

Hi guys!

I managed to recover the first program, "If I Had A Million Adventure". You'll find it attached.

It has two parts, a basic program and a machine code program.
I load the basic part right, but when I run it, I get an ?OM error in line 4:
The data in the file seems ok, so I don't know if the program is itself buggy or not. any ideas here?

Well done, Rob!

Enter POKE25,6:NEW before loading the game. I have added X=RND(-TIMER) to improve gameplay, and removed the machine code routine which deleted the entire game if the reset button was pressed.

EDIT: Attachment removed. Updated version here.

D'oh!

I'll try to recover the rest of the files, but it will take a bit...

Well, here you have the action part of "If I had a Million".

Both tapes haven't been "normalized" with xroar, so I don't know if you convert them to wav, if the dragon will be able to load them. Anyway, they work on xroar.

When I have the four tapes finished, I'll generate the best version of them.

I'm quite thrilled as we don't have these two games. During the following days, I expect to have all of them ready.

Regards!

Wow, well done guys. I felt sure someone would be able to rescue them. I am slowly trying to learn about the Dragon but it's not necessarily very easy when I didn't own one in my youth and there's no real Newbie's Guide out there on the Internet. When it comes to rescuing BBC and Acorn Electron games I know all the utilities off by heart and can usually get even the most badly warped tapes and discs to transfer to a PC with just a few commands and a few parameters changed. But I kinda thought that the time it would probably take *me* to copy to a real Dragon then learn all about exactly how to get them into .CAS format would take much much longer than just handing it over to you guys. And it has proven to be the case.

I have got a few more rare games as well (i.e. not on this site) which I can send a link to the WAV files for. They load on xRoar without problem so just need .CAS files generating.

If someone wants to point me (and I daresay a few others) in the direction of where I can learn exactly how the necessary utilities work then it would be much appreciated.

Hi,

Glad you like our work! I'd like to get that wav files to process them when I have a little time.

The best way, if they load on xroar is to load the emulator with the -tape-rewrite and -no-tape-fast command line switches, then select the wav file for loading with CTRL+L, then press CTRL+W and select a new file name for the output cas file, and finally CLOAD or CLOADM the game.

If everything loads ok, when you close the emulator window, you'll have a nice .CAS file.

If you have any problem, we'll be glad to help you.

I seem to have some issue when trying to play both versions of If I Had A Million (Adventure).

Whereas on the Dragon (the actual machine), the game shows the title screen and then starts me off with a large amount of money, on XRoar the game shows the title screen and then starts the game by saying "You have a cash flow problem. You have 0 properties and 0 cash."

Anyone else getting this? Not sure if it's a bug or not.

It seems that some bits of the BASIC program have gone missing during the recovery process.
I have attached a complete listing of the BASIC program in ASCII text format. If you would be willing to check it against the original on your real Dragon and fill in the missing code, we could still recover the game.

EDIT: Attachment removed.