| Posted By
Luca
on 2012-11-27
16:43:36
 |  TAPs Recaps
In few days, from one to the other one, Fabrizio Gennari has updated our prefer tools to convert, manage and archive the Commodore tapes, in order to prevent all of them from the degradation by time: WAV-PRG and Audiotap.
WAV-PRG allows the user to extract T64, .PRG o .P00 files from Commodore tapes and creating Commodore tapes from T64, .PRG o .P00 files. The new version 4.0.1 has notable improvements, especially for 264 machines users, so let's read'em:
- the tape extraction part has been rewritten. Now, a single plug-in can support several loaders (a loader supports one tape format) and observers (an observer examines data that have just been read from tape, and guesses the format to be used for the following data). Because of this, one can choose the loader Default C64 as start-up loader, and in many cases (not all) WAV-PRG will automatically switch to a different loader to load the rest of the tape. This reduces the need of guessing the right plug-in for each tape;
- you can drag and drop files onto the main window to start the conversion of such files (multiple files are supported);
- WAV-PRG can now read TAP v2 files (those using half waves): this adds support for some Commodore 16 formats that use an inverted waveform with respect to the rest of the same tape. So far, only a C=16 variant of Freeload is supported: supporting others is a matter of adding the respective plug-ins;
- WAV-PRG can create clean TAP files (in a fashion similar to Tapclean) from TAP or WAV files;
- the Windows command-line version (wav2prg.exe and prg2wav.exe) is now downloadable from the site (in the past, you had to compile it yourself). Useful, for example, to batch many conversions with a single script or .BAT file.
Audiotap is THE tool for creating TAP files from tapes and record tapes from TAP files.
Its enhancing usually follows what the previous tool performs, but here we are the very special feature of version 2.0: once selected the type of file (TAP, WAV or DMP) and format (C64, Vic20, C16, tape Version 0/1/2), you only need to drag'n'drop on the tool's window a bunch of files, and...magic in the air: a single TAP pops out, with all the files merged in one!
Thanks Fabrizio, letting us to preserve tapes, you stopped the time for real!
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2012-11-28
16:43:36
| Re: TAPs Recaps
This is very very good news! I hope my nagging a few years ago also contributed to this, but confess Luca, that your failed tape recovery project was the final straw  BTW, I too have some unrecoverable recordings such as the original instructions for MyChess 2.0.
Anyways, let's fire up the plugin factory! It's more or less up to us now (though I recall it requires C++ knowledge).
EDIT: actually it is a Colossus description in Hungarian done with on of the well known "typers" of the era. AudioTAP did a pretty good job, the TAP conversion still failed but at least not the entire file is corrupted only about half of it (I have had the same result though) :) I have just realized that AudioTAP does detect Her Turbo recordings, wow, could that be _the_ Freeload then?? Is that some C64 thing (very likely)?
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2012-11-28
18:12:35
| Re: TAPs Recaps
Nova Turbo is just the same as the C64 version. Some C64 tape utilities can even cope with C16 Novaload tapes. That is how I dumped (khm...  ) MyChess 2.0 at first.
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