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Hello fellow Dragoneers,

I picked up the game Cecil Plays 21 (Snip) in an eBay auction. The seller stated that it didn't work - and unfortunately so far he has been proved right. I have transferred both sides of it to wav files, but neither seems to be accepted by xRoar.

My attempts are available on the following links:

www.acornelectron.co.uk/Cecil_Plays_21.wav
www.acornelectron.co.uk/Cecil_Plays_21_2.wav
www.acornelectron.co.uk/Cecil_Plays_21_3.wav
www.acornelectron.co.uk/Cecil_Plays_21_4.wav

This is a general appeal for help. Can anyone rescue the files? This seems to be a game that is still missing in action so far.

(Please wait at least 10 minutes before attempting to download the wavs above... It can take a while for them to upload as the wav files are so big...)

I cannot take a look until tuesday, but I'll be doing it in case no one manages to get them earlier.

It looks like the digital capture is badly clipped. Try to adjust the recording volume so that you capture the full dynamic of the audio signal without saturating your sound card input. Avoid any automatic level adjustment.

Maybe you can tell us more about the equipment you are using and what possibilities you have to adjust levels and filter along the signal chain. Generally I would recommend to digitize the tape audio as direct and truthful as possible, and rather do any filtering or adjustments in the digital domain afterwards.

Not that it makes any difference here, but note that you have a stereo WAV file with the recording only in the left channel. You can at least make those files smaller by cutting off the right channel. But don't just mix both channels into mono because you will lose signal-to-noise ratio. Anyway, you could zip those files to make them smaller downloads and the quiet channel will be compressed to pretty much nothing.

*COUGH*

Took a bit of work in Audacity and some tricks I learnt from converting loads of tapes years ago when I first started this site.....

I used Audacity to initially amplify by 10 to force clipping at the boundaries of the wave form - The ADC in XROAR is more than happy to use clipped samples, it only cares about the rising and falling edge. This got me about 2 or 3 seconds into loading before I/O error arrived. Looked at the sample in detail and there was some "slowdown" of the sample rate, due to either tape stretching or uneven motor in the player - fixed 2 or 3 of these sections and this nearly worked, but using CLOADM was getting some I/O errors. One trick I used to use and has worked this time is to SKIPF each file - XROAR still dumps the bits to the CAS file. This can work, but I don't know why....and this time it did.