archive.worldofdragon.org

OK, here's the deal, attached are a couple of files that have been captured directly from my Dragon 64 as it loaded them So they should be complete copies of what is on the tape.

When I say captured, what I did was patched the dragon cassette firmware to echo each byte read from tape up to my PC via a FT245, this appears at the dragon end as a simple IO port, and at the PC end as a USB serial port, I then captured it using a terminal program in binary mode and output to a cas file. I have ran the files through fixcas and tried them in mess and they work ok.

I tried doing tubway army, but that also patches the tape system, so failed, I'll have to look into that one under mess (I did manage to get the loader), that will help me determine to problem.
So is there anything that perticually needs sampling that I might have, as this way we get an exact image of what's on the tape.

Cheers.

Phill.

Sounds an interesting method of capturing images, do you do this with CLOAD/CLOADM or SKIPF (or even AUDIO ON and MOTOR ON)? Plus, is it necessary to run the images through fixcas, as fixcas was created to overcome the problem of the old dc.exe stripping out leaders?

Another thing, Planet Invasion came with two versions on the cassette, a colour version and a B&W version - which you have not captured - that appears halfway along each side of the tape.

Alastair wrote:Sounds an interesting method of capturing images, do you do this with CLOAD/CLOADM or SKIPF (or even AUDIO ON and MOTOR ON)? Plus, is it necessary to run the images through fixcas, as fixcas was created to overcome the problem of the old dc.exe stripping out leaders?

For the two above I just used cloadm, but I would imagine skipf should also work, as it also reads the tape.
Because of the way that the system is patched, I look for the beginning of a block and (sync character <) and then send 3 U and the sync, so if I didn't run it through fixcas, I guess i'd not have sufficient lead er /interblock gap if anyone wanted to transfer back to tape. And IIRC Simon specifically asked for uploaded stuff to be ran through fixcas.

Another thing, Planet Invasion came with two versions on the cassette, a colour version and a B&W version - which you have not captured - that appears halfway along each side of the tape.

I did have a vague memory of that being the case, but could not find any refference to it on the cassette inlay, I'll go back and capture it again

Cheers.

Phill.