Issues creating/loading tap files in VICE

[grondinm]

So i am very new to this community. I recently got a VIC-20 and I'm diving in. Before i got my physical VIC i was messing around with things in VICE. I had some prg's i would convert to .tap to load in VICE and those would always work. Now i'm trying to create some .tap files from .wav files saved from my VIC. This is proving to not work consistently. While i can get them to load 9 times out of 10 they do not and i can't understand why. The tape counter in VICE gets to the end of the program then goes "?LOAD ERROR"

There seems to be no consistency as to when it works or does not. NTSC,PAL same results. If i take that tap file and convert it to a prg then VICE loads it fine everytime. Obviously something is wrong with the tap files. Should i just not use them and instead use prg files to share what i want to share off my VIC? Is there someway to know why VICE is doing this? Like it could litteraly load it then i go NEW and LOAD again but it fails.

Some tap files i've created can be found here viewtopic.php?f=10&t=9955 i swear those loaded fine before i posted them. Now i'm lucky if they load 1 in 10 tries it seems...just frustrating.

These where created from linux using audiotap either native version or using wine does not seem to make a difference.

[srowe]

Dumping one of the files it looks to me like there's a significant number of errors in it

Code: Select all

[srowe@gilraen src]$ python3 tap-decode.py ~/Downloads/Navets.tap | python3 tap-info.py 
00006a17  <S*69fe>
000079e2  errors=0 data len=202
00007a30  <S*004d>
000089fb  errors=0 data len=202
00008a48  <S*004c>
0001773f  errors=269 data len=3033
0001778d  <S*004d>
00024f80  errors=0 data len=2764
151504 True 73

The KERNAL routines can only recover a maximum of 30 errors.

[grondinm]

Ok so the files are messed for sure...What could cause these errors? Why does it sometimes load(very seldom)? Why does converted to a prg they work? going back to tap from that prg also works...

What tools are you using in python?


Thank you.

[srowe]

Ok so the files are messed for sure...What could cause these errors? Why does it sometimes load(very seldom)? Why does converted to a prg they work? going back to tap from that prg also works...

I'm not sure, looking at the raw encoding I'm guessing the data doesn't match the check bit. It might be a bug in the tool used to generate the .tap file.

What tools are you using in python?

They're scripts I've written myself to learn about the structure of tape images, I've created a module to develop applications

https://pypi.org/project/tapfile/

[grondinm]

They're scripts I've written myself to learn about the structure of tape images, I've created a module to develop applications

https://pypi.org/project/tapfile/

Cool. Wish i knew more about python to take advantage of those. I guess going forward I'll go prg to tap before sharing(because that still produces something that works)...or maybe just post the prg itself for anything i actually want to share.

Thanks again for looking.

[srowe]

I guess going forward I'll go prg to tap before sharing(because that still produces something that works)...or maybe just post the prg itself for anything i actually want to share.

.prg files are most of use to those of us that use SD2IEC devices.

[grondinm]

.prg files are most of use to those of us that use SD2IEC devices.

Then .prg they will be. Maybe both.