Denial

Greetings.

I recently found a cigar box of my old VIC-20 tapes and want to bring them in to an emulator. I have hooked up a home stereo tape player (the highest end model Radio Shack was selling back around 98 or so when I bought it) and have been digitizing the tapes to .wav files using Audacity on a Mac.

1) I found WAV-PRG and Audiotap and have been working with them (via Windows 10 running on my Mac):

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

I have been able to get a few solid conversions to .t64 files, but I was hoping for some tips to make this more reliable. For instance, I am not sure what volume level would work best (or all the sensitivity tweak settings in wav-prg).

I have been running VICE, and have been trying to get MAME to work since it claims to load .wav directly (but it doesn't do anything for me - always SEARCHING).

2) I would also like to know if there is a way to print out my old BASIC programs. Most have all kinds of embedded Petascii stuff in them (screen controls, characters, etc.) so I was hoping for a tool that would "print" them to a PDF with those graphics and stuff showing up like they did on the old micro thermal printer I used to have. I found printouts of all my stuff, but they are horribly faded at this point.

Thanks for any tips or pointers, and also to dabone for sending me here (and thus making me realize I found this place a few years ago and already had an account).

FYI - I have documented my progress so far here:

http://subethasoftware.com/2016/02/24/b ... -software/

I have a few other tapes that haven't converted at all so they may be dead at this point.

Really nice progress, it is fantastic the tape still are alive after all those years passed.

dabone converted my .wav files to .prg and those seem to work better. I tried them myself tonight. But, they auto start and some of mine are loaded in multiple parts, so I have to figure out how to get VICE to load but not auto start I guess.

I also ran in to issues with keyboard emulation on the Mac. I can't type the left arrow key, which is supposed to be the top left back quote ` but that breaks the program, the same as hitting escape.

Bit by bit...

Can someone explain the differences in .tap, .t64 and .prg? I seem to have much more success converting the .wav to .prg files, but I don't understand why that would be.

Thanks!

Where is a good place to ask VICE questions?

TAP = Physical transfer of the tape itself as a bundle of signals. You can re-write the TAP back to another tape and it should act as if it was the real thing.

T64 = An emulator specific container, it's like a tape version of a D64 (disk) file. I heartily recommend NOT using these.

PRG = A single program file. A TAP, D64 etc can be made up of multiple PRG files.

As for asking VICE questions, we have at least one people directly involved with the emulator on Denial for starters...

Mayhem wrote:TAP = Physical transfer of the tape itself as a bundle of signals. You can re-write the TAP back to another tape and it should act as if it was the real thing.

T64 = An emulator specific container, it's like a tape version of a D64 (disk) file. I heartily recommend NOT using these.

PRG = A single program file. A TAP, D64 etc can be made up of multiple PRG files.

As for asking VICE questions, we have at least one people directly involved with the emulator on Denial for starters...

Thanks. The .prg files seem to auto start, and I think some of my games had to load a customized font first, then the actual program. Not sure if that is part of the problem I have. It's been a long time since I wrote all these games.

It's going to be fun getting back up to speed.

Hi, did you figure out how to save your custom fonts?
I have got the same problem, I have got some good games I wrote 30 years ago on tape, but I wrote it with multiple loading stages to load in fonts and machine code and I have no recollection of how I did that now! I want to get them off the tape and into files so I can save them and share them, but so far all I can do is save only the BASIC code (to my sd2iec).
[I'd like someone to advise me how to save areas of memory to my sd2iec, not just the BASIC code.]

...

There's also this: raw tape transfer. Only unexpanded at the moment but I have a half finished version for expanded which I can complete if there is interest.

topcat wrote: ↑Wed Dec 28, 2016 10:57 am Hi, did you figure out how to save your custom fonts?
I have got the same problem, I have got some good games I wrote 30 years ago on tape, but I wrote it with multiple loading stages to load in fonts and machine code and I have no recollection of how I did that now! I want to get them off the tape and into files so I can save them and share them, but so far all I can do is save only the BASIC code (to my sd2iec).
[I'd like someone to advise me how to save areas of memory to my sd2iec, not just the BASIC code.]

Hello (after a few years). I did not. I am back at this project again, with plans to send my tapes to someone with a Datasette to maybe archive them for me better than I can.