archive.worldofdragon.org

I've been buying up Dragon software on eBay recently. I find most of it transfers to .wav format pretty easily, which can then be loaded into xRoar, but I've hit problems with the above two titles. They don't seem to be available anywhere on the Internet.

The tapes I've got are pirated versions and look like they were copied tape to tape in the 80s. I can read them in but they won't load. Probably the signal is too difficult for xRoar to recognize.

Does someone with more idea want to take the tapes off me and have a go? I know it's not ideal to source games from non-original cassettes but I don't see any other copies of these games making an appearance on the Net anytime soon...!

(1) Do you have a real Dragon 32 or 64?

(2) If so, do they load OK on your real Dragon?

If you could share the wav files, we could take a look at them and try to recover them.

They will load ok on the real Dragon yes. It's a second hand one and it has the same cassette recorder with it that they were presumably recorded on.

The .wav files are quite big, but I'll certainly upload them and you can have a go. Give me a half an hour or so and I'll put a link to them.

It can be that the programs have some sort of copy protection that depends on the timing in the tape, the leader bytes or value out of sync, but we can tell you more when get the wav files.

OK, have zipped 'em up and put 'em here:

http://www.acornelectron.co.uk/Dragon_Games.zip

Will probably take about 12 mins or so to download as big files.

Try making fresh cassette copies of the games using Duplicas v5 (Available from the archive downloads) on your real Dragon.

Were those voices on your cassette?

It sounds like it's been recorded with a microphone or something...

I think the cassettes were recorded on the same cassette recorder so I don't think it'll work, unless I can source a high quality cassette recorder to record the output of the Dragon and swap them around during loading/saving process.

Let's see if someone can rescue the files first.

Hmmm, first thing I see is that the wav files are stereo and as far as I know they should be mono.

So I isolated one of the channels and XRoar seems to load it well until it reaches an ?OM error.

I'm trying a deeper analysis of the wave data.