Creating .tap from old tapes

Bill_L · Post by **Bill_L** » Mon Jan 28, 2019 3:02 am

Anyone had success with this? I'm trying to convert some of my old games that I wrote years (like...35..) ago from audio tapes to .tap files, though I'm wondering if the tapes themselves are too degraded.
I got one of those USB cassette players off ebay, and tried creating .wav files to convert to .taps, but had no success so far - the best I've been able to do is get wavtoprg to find a partial file. I've also tried directly converting from audio input to a .tap, skipping the whole .wav creation, no success there either.
I'd be interested to hear if anyone has managed it and what they used to do it.
My next thought is to set up my real Vic, attempt to load them, then save again onto new tapes, and go from there.

beamrider · Post by **beamrider** » Mon Jan 28, 2019 3:54 am

Saving and loading on a real datasette would have the highest chance of success if this is possible.

There are dedicated devices available to grab .tap files. I have the manosoft Princess for instance.

Bill_L · Post by **Bill_L** » Tue Jan 29, 2019 11:17 pm

The Princess seems to be out of production..any others that you are aware of? I was also looking at making an adaptor like this http://markus.brenner.de/adapter/index.html

Or I might just dig out the Vic and use the real hardware on the weekend. All my Vic stuff is in storage for a while..

highinfidelity · Post by **highinfidelity** » Wed Jan 30, 2019 3:25 am

What a pity! Thanks heavens I put my hands on a Princess when it was available. What a great piece of hardware!

ops · Post by **ops** » Wed Jan 30, 2019 3:27 am

I have successfully converted my tapes from 1985 with Audiotap and TAPCleanFE. I had to try a few times with different volume levels before tapes were converted successfully.

http://wav-prg.sourceforge.net/audiotap.html

https://www.luigidifraia.com/tag/tapclean/

ral-clan · Post by **ral-clan** » Thu Jan 31, 2019 3:46 pm

I used the datasette to PC game port / parallel port method as described in the link in a message above and was successful. It was about 15 years ago, though, when PCs with game controller ports were more common!

I remember I had to play with the software speed adjustment when converting the .wav. I guess the original datasette was not playing back at exactly the right speed anymore.

The software was DOS software called somethign like WAV2TAP. It has a speed "adjustment" paramenter in it. Until I played with the parameters, my WAV file could not be deciphered by teh program. I think there was also a setting to "flip" the polarity of the wav that I had to use as well.

beamrider · Post by **beamrider** » Thu Jan 31, 2019 4:22 pm

Any particular reason you need a .tap file given that you said they are your own programs?

Seems to me the easiest method would be to obtain an SD2IEC device, load it on a normal Vic and then save back to SD-Card.

Bill_L · Post by **Bill_L** » Thu Jan 31, 2019 6:44 pm

No particular reason they had to be a .tap, it's just I wanted to use the hardware I already had available

But I think the easiest way would be with a real Vic and datasette involved. Going tape -> pc hasn't been very successful. I still have the datasette that they were originally saved with, so that should help too

Bill_L · Post by **Bill_L** » Thu Jan 31, 2019 6:46 pm

Oh, I'll also add, I have the bits lying around the place to build a Pi1541, so I'll do that then save them to a SD card

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Creating .tap from old tapes

Creating .tap from old tapes

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