Mac OS X to Atari 800 via Cassette Drive?

[Huxley]

Hi guys! I'm new around here (this is my first post), but I hope I can learn a lot from you all.

 

I just recently rescued a pair of vintage computers from a local barn (found a listing on Craigslist that panned out for once) - a TRS-80 Color Computer (the original silver one - I had one as a kid and loved it!) and an Atari 800 (rev. II, according to the stamp on the motherboard). I'd owned a few Atari computers as a kid (I think I had a 130XE), but never put much effort into them, so I'm making up for lost time with my 'new' 800. I spent several hours last night tearing down the Atari 800, scrubbing the case in the kitchen sink, taking the keyboard completely apart and washing each key, etc. It was a lot of work, but the system looks MUCH better now (25+ years spent in a barn in rural New Mexico weren't kind to the case and keyboard) and is happily booting from the handful of carts that I have for it ("Beamrider" is cool!). I fully expect my grandkids to be banging out BASIC programs on this thing - it's built like a tank, and only needed a tune-up.

 

Along with the 800 itself (and a power brick), the system came with a (crappy, worn out) joystick, 410 Cassette Drive, an 850 Expansion Module (with power brick, but no SIO cable to hook into the 800), and a small stash of game and program carts. I took some time tonight to take the 410 Cassette Drive apart, clean it out, and find out why it wasn't spinning the tape rotors (just making some sad grinding sounds). I'm sure this won't surprise anyone here, but it turns out that after ~25 years, those little rubber drive belts can get a little loose. After carefully swapping the old, sagging belt with a rubber-band my wife found in the kitchen, the drive seems to be happily spinning away. I don't have any program tapes to test it with, but if visuals are any indication, it's working much like it did when new. I knew all those hours spent watching MacGyver when I was a kid would pay off some day...

 

Right now, I'm mostly interested in the tape drive (at least until I find a floppy drive or an SIO-to-PC cable) as a possible means for getting downloaded software and games from my MacBook Pro over to the Atari. I'm quickly learning about the various SIO-to-USB adapters that are available, but right now I'm curious if I can find a way to use the gear I've got to do some simple data transfers.

 

So, here's the main question: Now that my tape drive is (presumably) working, is there a way that I could connect it to my Mac via a CD-to-tape adapter (I use one in my VW to listen to my iPod through the tape deck) and play back .wav's or .mp3's (or .cas?) of cassette programs into the 800? I did a little searching on google, but didn't find a definitive answer, probably because I'm somewhat unfamiliar with the Atari-specific terms I should be looking for.

 

Any tips or pointers would be more than welcome - again, I'm new to the Atari world, but I'm heavily into the "retrocomputing" hobby and I'm not scared of getting my hands dirty (or greasy or scratched up...).

 

Thanks!

 

Huxley

[Rybags]

You can't playback WAVs to the Atari since the 410/1010 does the FSK demodulation, and the audio line to the Atari is only a pass-through affair.

 

But, I would suggest getting some PC emulation going and using something like CAS2WAV to generate the files you need - then just record them to audio tape and load into the Atari.

 

Unsure if such utilities are available to directly run on MacOS but someone else should know.

 

Alternatively, just name what games you want and we could do a joint effort and upload some MP3s which you could DL and playback to tape.

[mimo]

I have got .wav files of a few games:

Captain Stickys Gold

Preppie!

Preppie2

River Raid

Sea Dragon

 

I can e-mail them if you PM me the address, sure I have got a whole load more on my laptop, just need to remember where I filed them.

 

Found some more

Crystal Castles

Frogger

LA Swat

Riley's Mine

Pole Position

Pooyan

Sudoko sweep

Edited June 6, 2007 by mimo

[Rybags]

I found that CAS2WAV WAV files Zip fairly well so probably worth a shot to save on bandwidth.

[Gunstar]

Congrats on the TRS-80 and 800! Yes, they are built like tanks, and it sounds like your doing a sound job on the cleaning&restoring process, the only way to do a good job is to take it apart to individual components and clean&rebuild. Your best option to get some software to that 800, as is, is to get an SIO2PC adapter (they have mac versions now, IIRC) and the best place to at least start is AtariMax.com., you''l have your 800 directly connected to your PC/Mac in no time transfering/loading 800 files directly from that Mac HD with A.P.E or similiar drive emulator.

Edited June 6, 2007 by Gunstar

[Urchlay]

Congratulations on getting an 800. In some ways they're the best Ataris (built like a tank, beautiful video output, nice keyboard, did I mention built like a tank?)

 

I'd recommend getting an SIO2PC cable as soon as possible, *but* since you're on a Mac, the timing is a bit wrong: What you will really ultimately want is the SIO2PC USB version from Atarimax, which just recently came out, but currently there's no Mac driver for it (or Linux, or anything else but Windows). This situation will change, but there's no ETA on when it will happen. You could get the regular (RS232) SIO2PC and use it on a Mac with a USB to serial converter (with SIO2OSX software, which costs money), but you'll eventually want the new USB SIO2PC when Mac drivers and software support become available... the USB version has some features that aren't possible on the serial version, and can transfer data faster too.

 

Meanwhile, with your current SIO2PC-less setup, it's still possible to record .wav files on cassettes and load them with the 410 drive. You *don't* want people to email you .wav or .mp3 files, though, if you can possibly avoid it (and MP3s may not even work, due to the lossy compression they use).

 

Instead, you want .cas files (Atari cassette images). These are *much* smaller than .wav files, and can be turned into .wav files... and later on, when you do get an SIO2PC, they can be used as-is, without going through the .wav step. There are quite a few .cas images available at these sites:

 

http://www.atarimania.com

http://cas-archive.pigwa.net

 

Once you have some .cas images, you need the cas2wav utility to convert them to .wav files. If you don't mind "getting your hands dirty" by using the Mac's UNIX shell, you can compile your own. I didn't write the cas2wav program, but I have modified it slightly to make it compile and run on UNIX-like systems. Grab it from:

 

http://www.urchlay.com/cassio/

 

The UNIX port of cas2wav is can be found inside inside the cassio-0.2.2.tar.gz source code archive. You'll need to compile it (read the directions in INSTALL.txt). Once you've built and installed cassio (and its associated utilities, including cas2wav), you can run a command like "cas2wav filename.cas", which will produce a .wav file called "filename.wav", which can be recorded onto a cassette and used in the 410. You can also attempt to use your headphone/cassette adaptor, which (depending on the game) may or may not work. The reason it may not work is that the 410 can be stopped and started under software control by the Atari, but there's no way for your Mac to know when to stop and start playing the .wav file. Some programs depend on the ability to stop the tape (e.g. so they can show you an intro screen or menu before the program has completely finished loading), and won't work properly if the .wav file starts playing the next segment of data before the program is ready to load it.

 

cassio itself can send a .cas image directly to the Atari, if you've got an SIO2PC cable. The current version of cassio doesn't support the USB SIO2PC, only the serial (RS232) one. I've never used it on MacOS, but it's known to work on Linux, FreeBSD, AIX, and Windows, so most of the portability issues have been ironed out by now I hope. Let me know if you have compile issues, I'll do my best to fix them for you.

 

Of course, once you have an SIO2PC, there's no reason to limit youself to cassettes! Disk images load many times faster, and they're more compatible (they don't suffer from the stop/start problem described above). Also, there are many more disk images available than cassette images.

 

Good luck, and have fun!

[Huxley]

Wow - I'm overwhelmed! Thank you all so much for the great info, and special thanks to Mimo for actually RARing two batches of .wav files and emailing them to me! You guys are awesome.

 

Urchlay:

Thanks for all the specific info! One possible advantage that I have that I didn't think to mention in my first post is a fully working Windows XP Pro installation via Parallels on my Mac. I also have a USB-to-Serial adapter (I use it to sync my Newton 2100 to the Mac), and I'm wondering if maybe I couldn't find a way to go from a virtualized PC operating system to the USB/serial adapter to a SIOtoPC adapter to the 800? Whew! That'd be pretty cool if I pulled that off...

 

Again, thanks for all the awesome ideas and info, everyone. I've got my hands full now...

 

:-)

 

Huxley