RE: Robust tape decoders anywhere?

From: Gideon Zweijtzer (gideonz_at_dds.nl)
Date: 2003-05-20 07:16:22

I once wrote a program to load turbo-saved programs from a tape with an
Amiga and a sound sampler. It worked pretty well, but since my Amiga is
somewhere in a cabinet, that program has probably got lost. It wasn't
such a pain to write, though... I think it is even easier to just
connect a tape deck to your PC, sample the whole tape and run the
decoder program over it to extract all programs. I think those decoder
programs are readily available on the web.

Gideon



> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-cbm-hackers@cling.gu.se 
> [mailto:owner-cbm-hackers@cling.gu.se] On Behalf Of Marko Mäkelä
> Sent: Monday, May 19, 2003 08:46
> To: cbm-hackers@cling.gu.se
> Subject: Re: Robust tape decoders anywhere?
> 
> 
> On Sun, May 18, 2003 at 11:15:01PM -0400, wlevak@cyberspace.org wrote:
> > If the signal is not on the tape, you cannot get it off.  Try an 
> > oscilloscope on the output from the read head.  If you have 
> signal, a 
> > storage scope may be able to capture it.
> 
> The signal sounds pretty much the same as it is supposed to.  
> I think that the number of pulses is still correct - only the 
> times when the pulses are triggered vary too much.
> 
> To rescue some tapes in standard format, I wrote a slightly 
> more error-tolerant decoder, which you can find at 
> http://www.funet.fi/pub/cbm/crossplatform/transfer/datassette/

as decode.pl.  It's not very good, and a lot of manual postprocessing is
needed.  I understand that writing anything similar for the Turbo Tape
format is more challenging, since there are only two distinct pulse
widths.  The standard format uses a third pulse width for marking byte
boundaries, and it stores each data block twice.

	Marko

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