Re: PET/CBM Tape Archiving

On Fri, Oct 05, 2012 at 12:38:50PM -0700, Mike Naberezny wrote:
>I have about 150 cassettes for PET/CBM that I'd like to make available 
>online.  I'm looking for advice on an efficient way to archive the 
>tapes to PRG or TAP format.

I tried an audio tape deck and TAPir with some success about 10 years 
ago to create pulse stream files (*.tap images).

>My first attempt was to use an audio recorder to produce WAV files. I 
>then tried WAV2PRG (http://wav-prg.sourceforge.net/index.html) on them.

Note that the *.prg format can lose some data. On the cassette, you have 
a 192-byte tape header followed by the actual program payload. Usually 
the 192-byte header contains a 16-byte file name and start/end addresses 
only. Sequential tape files are divided to 192-byte blocks. There are 
two copies of each block on the tape. The 'high-level' tape image format 
(as opposed to a pulse stream, or *.tap file) is sometimes called *.cas 
or *.csm. My cbmconvert utility can handle it.

>I have a working C2N but I am hoping to find something more automated 
>than using BASIC to LOAD each program from tape and then SAVE it back 
>to disk.  I would be willing to build a circuit if there's a hardware 
>project that will help.

You could connect the C2N to the parallel port of a PC and use mtap to 
create *.tap images, which you can convert with my "c2n" utility to 
high-level tape images and then with cbmconvert to *.prg.

For some corrupted tapes, I took both copies of the decoded tape data 
(possibly produced with a tweaked version of my "c2n" utility, to make 
it ignore errors) and picked the best of both copies with GNU Emacs. It 
was quite a bit of work, but I did not have any other copy of that Basic 
program.

	Marko

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