Home Page Forums MAME MAME MESS Dumping Project ?

Oh, ok... I just hope nobody mistakes them for the real deal and spreads them as such. =|

Hmmm... What about cassettes that include some speech or music inbetween blocks or after them? Would 22kHz be enough not to have any sound loss?


Also, just like double-sided floppies include both sides even when they're redundant, I was thinking that it would be only logical for proper tape wave dumps to also include both sides even if one of them consists on actual bonus music. In a few cases, it might be even intended to be an integral part of the game, as in Automata's Deus Ex Machina.

I'd rather see this case as something that should help set the standard wave settings for proper cassette archival, rather than something to be taken as an exception.


And kinda related, while we're at it, I just wanted to mention that it should be taken into account for these softlists that some tapes include games for different systems, as in Whopper Chase or Werewolves of London. In these cases, the dumps I've seen strip the other versions from the image, and thus are technically bad (incomplete) dumps.

Since disk images are far more common, I'm guessing this has already been taken care of for multisystem diskettes such as the original release of Spy Vs. Spy, so I won't go into that.

I am (crazyc and Kalle too, I think) looking for a bootable disk image.
PCjr diskettes usually cannot boot on IBM PC JX. An ascii string in the master boot record that is tested during a boot sequence in BIOS is "IBMJ" on IBM PC JX while "IBM" on IBM PCjr.

Hideki a developer of another and not released emulator is not able to boot his disk images with Takeda's eJX.
http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA024651/develop/

He just got error beeps with blank screen.
Hideki tried his BIOS ROM which came from IBM PC JX-5 on Takeda's emulator. He doesn't have the BIOS ROM which we use on MESS/eJX.
So it seems, his disk images are working with his BIOS ROM.
He is not willing to share his BIOS ROM with us and not interested on our BIOS ROM.

The MESS driver seems to based on Takeda's "Common Source Code Project".

Well, MESS's PC JX bios is bad dumped?
I don't think so.
At least checksum byte must be 00h.
I think this must problem of emulation.

I wonder what 5601jda.bin is.

Anna, did you have any luck converting Ola's WAV dumps to CAS?

I'm genuinely interested on this because I want to know the technical facts before whenever I start redumping at least some of the hundreds of tapes I've already released as TAPs and TZXs.

Even if the tones read by the computer are within that range, those are sometimes not the only contents in those tapes, so the ideal standard of choice should take into account that there might be other kinds of recorded sounds (which might require a higher sample rate not to lose any information), which might even be recorded in stereo (so making mono rips would be useless for preservation).

I took a look at the wav files and they seem to have been recorded at a way too high level, so I'd suggest redumping them at a lower volume.

As I suspect you already know, it depends. If it's a pure metal formulated tape recorded with Dolby C playing on a Nakamichi or similar audiophile-grade deck, cassettes can have a real frequency response in the 18 to 20 kHz range and up to 72 dB of dynamic range.

Back in the reality of computer cassettes, none of those things are likely and the quality is going to be significantly less (as with other analog formats, the quality of the tape player involved is a major, major variable). So if you want to be totally paranoid, go for 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo, which exceeds the capabilities of even high-end cassettes on all axes at once. But for tapes that are *only* computer data, 8-bit mono at 22 kHz is fully viable as an archival medium.

With Ola's "SSF1_Solar_System_Forces.wav" I have no luck.
It seems, the header data can not be detected or created.
Otherwise, the WAV file as such is working.
Not tried the other ones in detail.

I'm curious, what systems or games actually placed recorded sounds/music in between data blocks, or after the game data? When I saw this it intrigued me as I wasn't sure what purpose it would serve, if there were systems that existed that were limited enough to offload recorded sound samples onto tape in analog form yet still capable enough of playing them back on demand as every system that I used with tapes did not have very fine control over the tape drive; plus the media doesn't really lend itself to that use unless it's something like a loop tape. Or was it more of a place marker or bonus/easter egg/what-have-you, like the way early CD console systems included an audio track or two, either the standard "don't play this in a CD player" message or perhaps a track or two of theme music, generally on the CDXA discs that wouldn't otherwise be playable.

Either way, cursory googling told me nothing so I figured I would ask.