Can I use an Atari 410 Tape Recorder on an Atari XE System?

[potatohead]

Ahh, the cassette adapter. Perfect, and yes the far more practical. Didn't even think of it.

 

I wouldn't mod a drive either.

[Rybags]

Interesting idea from Bryan there.

 

The electronics in the drive don't care about framing, they only deal on tones and generate what they think each bit should be.

 

From the computer side, it would be easy enough to roll your own 2-tone encoding which uses much less start/stop bits and larger blocksizes.

 

The mere act of doing away with start/stop gives a 25% speedup in itself. ie, 40 bits normally = 4 bytes, without framing gives 5 bytes.

 

A typical tape record might be something like:

- speed measurement bytes as per normal with start/stop (20 bits 0101... etc)

- 2 bytes indicating # of data bytes remaining in block (no start/stop)

- 0 to 1024 data bytes, no start/stop bits

- 1 checksum byte for entire record except speed measuring bytes, followed by stop bit

 

I imagine with a moderate bitrate increase, larger blocksize and doing away with start/stop that a near 100% speedup could be achieved.

 

The hurdle I see though is that over time the sampling would drift, so some stop bits would be needed within the data.

Pokey Timers would be used to determine when a sample is required.

Possibly some sort of algorithm could be employed such that bit state transitions could resync the timing.

Many modern day transmission protocols use encoding such that transitions are guaranteed within a certain number of bits transmitted, possibly that could be the key.

Edited November 29, 2013 by Rybags

[greblus]

With the conversion being done inside the tape drive, it seems to me, modding one to inject the audio where it would come from the tape head, or right after would work just fine.

 

Has anyone ever attempted this?

 

 

Sure, here's a description of how to modify XC12: http://atarionline.pl/v01/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1210454126&archive=&start_from=0&ucat=6&ct=wynalazki

 

(unfortunately in polish).

 

But if you're looking only for the nostalgia sounds, it's better to make even the simplest sio2pc cable and use aspeqt, where you can simulate the tape drive (if i remember well it works even with xex files).

[Justin Payne]

OK, either I'm crazy or two people in this world experienced the same stretching of time when loading Pharaoh's Curse from cassette.
This guy on YouTube said it was like 20+ minutes. Of course, I said 45 minutes but 20 minutes seems reasonable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oezBzU6PpRg.

 

"I didn't get to play it often because we only had a tape version, which took 20+ minutes to load and inevitably failed, discouraging my 5-year-old self, but when I did I felt rewarded by all the cool scenes you could wander through."

 

To heck with math. Perception is fall more reliable.