Loading games (Tapes)

[Nik]

Hi,

Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but I am new at this. I have a dragon 32, and I am attempting to load the games (WAV) by playing them on my laptop with VLC player and putting the dragon loading lead into the laptop earphone socket. It works fine for "Chuckie Egg" but all other games seem to hang right at the end of the wav file. Does anybody know what I am doing wrong ? or why they are not completing the load ? Any help would be gratefully received.

[admin]

You are doing everything right - might be worth playing around with the volume level of the earphone socket.

Let us all know which games you are having a problem with and more detailed description of whats on the screen.

[Nik]

Hi thanks for the reply,

I have tried the volume, I can get around it on some games by playing the WAV file again. This instantly gives an I/O error and I can the sometimes start the game with EXEC. It seems as if the WAV file is not telling the dragon to stop loading when it is completed.
The games I have tried that don't work are:
Microdeal - Mr Dig [exec]
Microdeal - Grabber [exec]
Tom Mix Software - Buzzard Bait [exec]
Software Projects - Manic Miner
Microdeal - Donkey King [-buff]
Microdeal - Cuthbert goes Digging [exec]
APEX_INVADER

I have tried about a dozen others and the same. The only one that works ok is "Chuckie Egg"

[admin]

Have you tried a different media player - maybe VLC is truncating the file to early?

I'm not in a position to test these at the moment, but if anybody else can confirm that these can load it would be useful.

[Alastair]

I use Audacity (version 1.2.6, see http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) for this sort of thing. I've yet to have a problem with it sending wave files to a Dragon though I haven't loaded many programs this way.

[zephyr]

Hi Nik,

The following tip was posted by someone (don't remember who) at the old Dragon forum.

Assuming your using windows, open notepad and type U 255 times...

UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

Then save as padding.txt

I would do the following..

FIXCAS original.cas fixed.cas
copy /b fixed.cas + padding.txt new.cas
DC new.cas

This should create a .WAV file with a tone at the end - you can play with the number of U's in padding.txt if you think it needs to be longer.

[Nik]

Mate,

Thanks for your help. The "Audacity" program you told me to use works every time on any game (WAV) I have tried. It does seem that VLC seems to do something weird at the end. I was using v1.1.5 of VLC just for the record. But thanks again, I am well pleased. Just need to get myself a joystick or some type of converter to 5 pin din. All the best my friend, and again many thanks for your help.

Rgds,

Nik..

[1982dragon1982]

Hello Nik, I was interested to read this about the VLC player you posted a few weeks ago. I have just started to use the WAV games and have had the same problem with VLC 1.1.7
It plays to the available time given but the very end of the game isn't actually there for most games therefore the Dragon freezes in its loading mode.
I have found that pressing reset and typing Exec will run some games but not all.
I followed the advice about the audacity player, for some reason I can't get that to work yet. I wonder if other people use other players.
Just thought I'd mention VLC does this for me as well.

Mike.