| Posted By
Retron
on 2001-04-10
|  Creature Crawl / Space Desert / Road Stunner
I'm currently sampling my old Plus/4 tapes. About half work, while the others seem to be too quiet to be sampled properly. One of the tapes that should work (ie it looks similar to the others in Cooledit, no corruptions or anything) is a C16 / Plus/4 tape, from Commodore, with Creature Crawl, Space Desert and Road Stunner on it. What's odd is that loading it on a real Plus/4 and Yape both lead to ?Load Error being displayed. On the tapes which have degraded over time, I get a ?Break Error instead.
If anyone could help me to get this tape to load, I'd be grateful (I'd also then be able to grab the last two games, which aren't on Lando's site).
Thanks,
Retron
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Posted By
MIK
on 2001-04-11
 | Ok's.
If the rest of your collection is loading fine then it could well be the tape...
The correct way is with a tape head alinement kit, but I've never seen one for Plus4. So I've done mine by guess work.
You can by all means adjust your heads if you want to try. But do it at your own risk.
There is a small hole above the second "O" in the large COMMODORE logo on top of the dataset. You will need a watch screw driver to turn the screw left or right.
Open the lid so you can see inside. PRESS PLAY down (no tape inside) and the small screw should be inline with the small hole at the top.
Before you move the screw remember how much you have turned it. If your not happy with the new setting then you know where to turn it back to (how you had it before you moved anything)
Only 1/8th of a turn to the left or right is needed each time to move the heads up or down and then test it for loading.
If your getting a ?BRAKE ERROR the heads are to high or to low...
If you move the heads and the game does not show "FOUND" (just a blue screen all the time) You have turned the screw way to much the wrong way.
If the game says "FOUND", but crashes while loading past here you must tweak, fine tune the setting.
Also note: Nova Load Turbo's are the easyest of files to load. The rate of loading is very high even if the heads are out a little.
Remember Side "A" or "B" could of been recorded on a differnt divce (master copyer) and you might find "A" to load and not the other side ?...... So it is hard to find the correct setting by guess work!
I leave it to you to deicide if you should wish to adjust your heads...
regards,
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Posted By
rOuGh
on 2001-04-11
| Maybe...
it's just... broken!! 
Use mtap from http://arnold.c64.org instead of wave samples, it'S cooler. 
but I think you need a 64 for it. 
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Posted By
Retron
on 2001-04-10
| Dumb question
Thanks for the info - I've got a dumb question, though: how do you adjust the heads on the datasette? (I don't have the manual for it). I've been using an old Walkman to create the samples, which probably isn't ideal - although it works well enough half of the time.
It just seems odd that it's just this one tape - the other 60 or so all work (or worked) fine. This tape didn't even work 12 years ago
Thanks again,
Retron
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Posted By
MIK
on 2001-04-10
| It does look as if your heads are out of alinement <more>
It does look as if your heads are out of alinement if it is not loading on your real machine. Try adjusting the heads up or down a little and see what you get.
To be honest, unless the tape has been in the rain or close to a speaker (magnet) they age very well from my point of view. I have well over 200 C16/Plus4 original cassette games. You can see from my mtap images just how good they have aged.
As for your wav sample of the tape. You will get a ?BREAK ERROR if you are close to the correct volume level. Your volume setting is to low or too high when recording the tape. It is very, very hard to make samples of the cassettes, but you may not be far off...
I spent many hours trying to make samples of some cassettes and only a couple I did make
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