On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 2:11 PM, Marko Mäkelä <msmakela@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 08, 2009 at 01:01:22PM -0400, Ethan Dicks wrote:
>> >  If the PET Rabbit is anything like Vic Rabbit, I wish you luck.
>>
>> That sounds like you put some time into it and gave up.
>
> No, just look at my findings of the Vic Rabbit.

Ah.  Gotcha.

> The implementation is
> flawed in that the generated pulse widths vary a lot, more than the pulse
> widths written by the Commodore routines.  There is not much difference
> between the widest short pulse and the narrowest medium pulse.

That's unfortunate.  I don't remember problems with real Rabbit tapes
back in the day, but it sounds like there isn't much robustness.  I
never had a disk drive until I got a 1540 in 1982.  All of my PET work
(1977-1982) was saved on tapes (the ones I still have).  I was happy
to use the PET Rabbit because it saved a lot of time, and I had the
free ROM space to keep it in the machine at all times (along with an
improved Machine Language Monitor that included a line-at-a-time
assembler/disassembler and the Sykes BASIC Toolkit).

>  I didn't
> have any tapes in that format; I merely tested the cartridge image I got.

OK.  I don't know if the formats are identical or merely similar, but
with some free time, I should probably be able to generate some
samples for comparison.

> For sampling, many people have had success with mtap under MS-DOS or FreeDOS,
> connecting a C2N to the parallel port of a PC.

mtap.  That's what I was using that was able to read about 98% of my
C=-format PET tapes.  It worked fine for ones that were in good enough
shape to read in a real machine.

-ethan


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