Converting cassettes

[paul]

I've got a box of ~90 Dragon cassettes (not all originals), and a cassette recorder.

If I use it with a real Dragon, I get the 'S', then (eg) 'F SPACETRK', so it appears that the cassette player & cassette are OK.

Then, I try to convert to a CAS file.

I can capture the wibbly noise (TM) to a WAV file - now what do I do with it?

I can't work out what I'm meant to do in XRoar to load it - because everything I do just leaves it sitting with an 'S' (searching). I can't tell if XRoar is even reading the WAV file at all.

If I use DCWin, then it ALWAYS gives me a 'Block checksum failure at 44' error - exactly that error, regardless of which cassette I try, and what volume level I use.
(I don't know how it works, but I'd have expected the '44' value to change if the tape was dodgy as the error would be at different places)

So, I'm obviously doing something fundamentally wrong - but what could it be?

[robcfg]

Can you post your wav file so we can take a look?

There can be a huge difference between a real Dragon and a program on another computer when it comes to filtering and processing the audio signal.

So, please, send us the wav file so we can solve the mistery.

[paul]

OK, I've uploaded an example WAV file to

http://bigfiles.co.uk/pscs/Startrek4.wav

This is stereo 32bit sampling at 44.1kHz at the same volume level on the cassette recorder as works with the real Dragon (the waveform looks good in my capture software)

[paul]

OK. I think I may have found the problem.

I was being overambitious with the sampling.

32 bit floating point stereo sampling at 44.1kHz doesn't work

8 bit integer mono sampling at 44.1kHz works fine.

I can't find anything anywhere saying what settings to sample with - maybe something to add to the Wiki (I'd add it myself, but I don't think I have permissions )

[Sarah]

Yep, I'm glad you figured that out!

There's a little information about DCWIN in the wiki that you may have already seen and a small amount of discussion here although no instructions. The DCWIN core borrows extensively from the far older MS-DOS based tool DC.EXE; as a result the documentation for DC.EXE (supplied with the PC-Dragon emulator) is also somewhat applicable to DCWIN.