I'm currently helping Mat Allen with some TAP ports, and i've just done all my copied cassettes which might have some interesting bits and pieces on...
Sadly, for reasons unknown... a good few of the TAP images i've ported have come up saying there is nothing on them. Not sure if this is because they need cleaning up first or what. I know that some of the images which have registered blank, do infact have games on them.. so I may need to re-port some. Hopefully they haven't deterioted too much or anything
Zip will be taken down later this week, so grab a copy if you are interested to have a nose through. Some games are crashing, but I think they always have (I.e. Missile Command) and might need fixing.
Will post another download soon of a load of commercial TAP images i'm doing for GB20.
I've recorded in VicPal mode, but the tapes are also PAL tapes too. Its possibly something to do with the XE1541 method i'm using with Tapserv ... or the bit of dirt I found on the tape heads ....
Due to have another big conversion attempt very soon... so i'll try again I think with this lot. One tape which had a fair few gems sadly doesn't load anything at present ... most seem to be fading away.
TAP preserves all data, headers, intended load errors (?) and so on. T64 is a high level representation of the parsed data only, and quite artificial if you ask me. On the other hand, a D64 can be said to be artificial too compared to a G64 image.
Good question whether NTSC tapes can be read on a PAL VIC and vice versa. Given the different clock frequencies and what I remember from the 1980's, I'd guess tapes are barely readable in one direction, but not in the other. Probably from NTSC to PAL, but not the other way.
I can confirm that I was able to load some Anirog cassette games from the UK on my NTSC VIC-20 (these were 8K games). I did have load errors occassionally though, but the cassettes are very old.
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