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Anyone use or collect cassettes?


BassGuitari

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Just curious. :) Certainly, given the ubiquity of Disk II systems and CFFAs and whatnot, there's really no practical reason to use tapes, unless you're trying to recreate an early Apple setup or something. Or you're some kind of maniac like me who just thinks they're neat. :-D

Sidebar: it's interesting that while most systems had straightforward loading commands--usually a variant of LOAD or CLOAD or something, or the SYSTEM command with the TRS-80--loading tape software on the Apple was sometimes a complicated affair. Beneath Apple Manor, for example, had you load something from the system monitor, then go to Integer BASIC and enter a lomem command or something, then load/run another part from Integer BASIC, then use a goto command to run it.

Granted, plenty of other Apple tapes were more straightforward to load, but it's interesting how complicated some of them were.

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I have a cassette recorder making its way to me, but I couldn't actually use it directly on my Apple IIgs. I think I'd be more interested in a program that could take a raw PCM stream (maybe grab SDL and use SDL_LoadWAV to open something a little less raw?) and convert that to a set of monitor commands ala what's done to bootstrap ADTPro, and used much the same way. That'd allow binary cassettes to be loaded onto a //c or IIgs.

 

Integer programs saved to cassette are a bit more complicated, but they could be loaded the same way from the BASIC prompt. I don't know if any Applesoft programs made it on to cassette in wide circulation.

 

The thing is that the CFFA3000 is a very expensive card. There are less expensive options out there, just that none of them seem to be quite as effective at doing everything you could need. The closest is the SD Smart Drive, but it requires a Smartport do provide floppy and block devices. I guess block devices are somewhat a luxury on the purely 8-bit machines, but the IIgs really does need a hard drive of some sort.

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I don't know if any Applesoft programs made it on to cassette in wide circulation.

It looks like there were some, but yeah, the "wide circulation" part might be trickier. Disk II systems pretty much took over as early as 1978, didn't they? How common was it for Apple II users to *not* have disk systems after '78-79?

 

Does anybody know if there were any tape programs that were never commercially available on disk? That's the only other practical reason I can think of to keep a tape system running, but even then, it wouldn't take much to move those tape programs to a floppy.

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I'm certain there are lots of Apple // programs that are still not archived to this day. I have it in my mind to try and better index what we've got to make it easier to figure out what's missing, but that's not an easy task I've discovered.

 

I started out with the contents of asimov's images/games/adventure directory and GSPort. Many of the images don't start. :(

 

Ideally what I'd like to do is build a tool that for each disk image will determine what format the image is (DOS 3.3, ProDOS, RDOS, ProntoDOS, Pascal, etc.), how much space is used/free, its catalog, in the case of things like ProDOS, what version of ProDOS, whether the disk is bootable, etc. If the disk is bootable, I'd like to boot it and get a screenshot in an automated fashion. Hopefully all of this will provide enough information that the cryptic names on asimov can be translated to names, related files referenced, duplicates detected, etc.

 

Not looking to replace asimov, just index it so that it's easier to find something on it, especially if you only know some of the information about what you're looking for.

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