Posted By
Fraser
on 2007-06-30
07:05:52
|  CSW Viewer
Could you have a link to my CSW Viewer program in the Tools page? It is a program for viewing CSW or TAP files graphically. I'd prefer a link rather than having the archive file on multiple sites. The address is http://www.acornpreservation.org/makeuef/index.html .
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2007-06-30
08:11:35
| Re: CSW Viewer
Is this tool of any use for our scene (Plus/4 & C16)?
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Posted By
Fraser
on 2007-06-30
09:50:55
| Re: CSW Viewer
It should interest anyone thats looking at computer tape files in detail.
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2007-06-30
11:21:15
| Re: CSW Viewer
Please add proper support for C16 tapes then first. Some tapes do load properly with your program, most however do not (the so-called"half" wave - and not to mention native - TAPs specific for the C16 and the plus/4). I still fail to recognize what the benefit is of this program for us +4 users, other than loading and viewing the pulses? The CSW format is not used in any of the Commodore emulators.
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Posted By
Crown
on 2007-06-30
16:17:21
| Re: CSW Viewer
It can be useful, if while looking at the waveform, you can also see what that is going to be decoded into... (IE recognizing standard bit pulses, sync pulses, standard Commodore blocks, turbo loader specific blocks etc... Displaying the whole thing in hex and in block information) It would be even better, if you could manipulate it and fix tapes with it, which just do not load properly....
It's something I always wanted to do...
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Posted By
Fraser
on 2007-06-30
16:50:11
| Re: CSW Viewer
Gaia, can you gives some links to TAP files that don't load?
A lot of Crown would like is already done for Spectrum files. I'd prefer to have the program as generic as possible rather than having many features for specific tape files. Most of the things you would like would take quite a lot of work. I have generally put in the features that are most wanted.
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2007-06-30
17:35:24
| Re: CSW Viewer
Sure, an example could be Tomcat, byte #12 is set to 2 for native "half-wave" tape images, whereas it is 1 for "legacy" C64 compatible tape dumps. Generic programs are generally cool 
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Posted By
Fraser
on 2007-07-01
07:01:57
| Re: CSW Viewer
Is there any better TAP format descriptions than the one with Vice? It only describes the V0 and V1 formats. I'm allowing the first 3 bytes to be "C16" or "C64". Are there any other headers used?
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Posted By
Fraser
on 2007-07-02
14:04:50
| Re: CSW Viewer
Is there anything else about the V2 format?
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2007-07-02
14:53:01
| Re: CSW Viewer
Here's a C array that documents it (source is worth a thousand words  ):
unsigned char tapHeader[] = {
'C','1','6','-','T','A','P','E','-','R','A','W',
0x02, // version -> 1 - whole wave 2 - halfwave (C16/+4 specific)
0x02, // 0 - C64, 1 - VIC20, 2 - C16/+4
0x00, // Video standard ( 0= PAL, 1 =NTSC, 2 = NTSC2
0x00, // empty
// data length (4 byte) file size
// data
};
"Half-wave" means that by one TAP byte we measure the length of one half of a square wave pulse, and the initial phase is "low" (for the same C64 TAP you would store the sum of the two subsequenting bytes on one TAP byte). While the C64 tape input is edge triggered (IIRC) the plus/4 does not have this and many custom tape loaders invert the phase of the tape pulse (probably incidentally).
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Posted By
Fraser
on 2007-07-03
13:39:57
| Re: CSW Viewer
Do the video standard and machine type fields apply to V0 and V1 as well?
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Posted By
Ulysses777
on 2007-07-03
13:53:04
| Re: CSW Viewer
You might want to look at the source code for mtap (a tool for creating TAP files, including C16 halfwave TAPs) at http://markus.brenner.de. The source is included in the zip file.
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Posted By
Fraser
on 2007-07-05
13:53:06
| Re: CSW Viewer
I've written in my new code. Why isn't there a format description anywhere? I'm not sure if everythings correct.
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2007-07-07
18:50:37
| Re: CSW Viewer
There isn't because noone has written any Well I think the source for mtap/ptap is a good reference indeed. There isn't really much more to it than what is described there already.
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