Many questions about cassette tapes
Egan Ford
My first Apple was a II+ with floppies. I never got to experience the
joy or frustration of cassette tape as a volatile storage medium, so I
thought I'd give it a go and was able to backup and restore a BASIC
program. However...
I've been trying to load up a few games from the excellent
http://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/projects/cassettes/index.html archives on
my IIe (physical and virtual) and I get ERR. Most likely because most
of them are INT BASIC. So I booted a 3.3 master and typed INT and
then LOAD and now I get ERR*** MEM FULL ERR.
Questions:
1. Can I remove FP and replace with INT BASIC on the IIe without a
soldering iron, chip extractor, or PROM burner? Will that solve my
MEM FULL ERR?
2. If I can do #1, how would I tape load INT BASIC? Can I make a
tape of INT BASIC? I want to see how far I can take this tape thing.
E.g. Boot, reset, LOAD INT BASIC, INT, kill FP, LOAD INT game,
play, ...
3. Can I boot from tape on a IIe? Actually I know I can based on the
ADTPro instructions. But how would I create a boot tape?
4. Is there any advanced tape usage/programming information floating
around? "Beneath Apple Tape?" All I have been able to find was the
II and II+ tape guides that do little more than cover SAVE and LOAD.
I did find the audio format on Apple's site (it may be of interest
later on).
5. Any cool hacks, like IIe to IIe networking with audio? Or a token
passing network with 3 or more IIs?
6. Any great tape stories?
Thanks.
D Finnigan
> Gents (and Ladies?),
>
> My first Apple was a II+ with floppies. I never got to experience the
> joy or frustration of cassette tape as a volatile storage medium, so I
> thought I'd give it a go and was able to backup and restore a BASIC
> program. However...
>
> I've been trying to load up a few games from the excellent
> http://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/projects/cassettes/index.html archives on
> my IIe (physical and virtual) and I get ERR. Most likely because most
> of them are INT BASIC. So I booted a 3.3 master and typed INT and
> then LOAD and now I get ERR*** MEM FULL ERR.
You likely need to adjust the tone or volume control of the cassette
playback machine.
Pages 4 through 9 of the Red Manual
(online PDF here: http://macgui.com/kb/article/352 )
offer notes on how to load a tape, and also what to do if there are errors.
>
> Questions:
>
> 1. Can I remove FP and replace with INT BASIC on the IIe without a
> soldering iron, chip extractor, or PROM burner? Will that solve my
> MEM FULL ERR?
>
No. The DOS 3.3 System Master loads Int Basic (and also the Programmer's Aid
#1 and old Monitor) into the Language Card of the IIe, and that is good
enough.
>
> 3. Can I boot from tape on a IIe? Actually I know I can based on the
> ADTPro instructions. But how would I create a boot tape?
Not sure what you're asking here. The Apple either loads data into RAM from
a tape, or dumps a range of its memory back to tape.
So, you could load any sort of operating system or other program that you
wanted from tape. ADTPro is loading the ADT client program, which will allow
a disk image with DOS to be transferred and written out to a physical disk.
>
> 4. Is there any advanced tape usage/programming information floating
> around? "Beneath Apple Tape?" All I have been able to find was the
> II and II+ tape guides that do little more than cover SAVE and LOAD.
> I did find the audio format on Apple's site (it may be of interest
> later on).
Not really; Apple users of the day gave up tapes pretty quickly as soon as
the disk system was released in 1978.
>
> 5. Any cool hacks, like IIe to IIe networking with audio? Or a token
> passing network with 3 or more IIs?
Check out Michael J. Mahon's NadaNet:
http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/NadaNet.html
This is a full networking stack: physical transport over cassette ports and
a software protocol.
There are also some ways to digitize sound using the cassette ports and some
additional hardware. Try the 1979 compendium, Peeking At Call-Apple for an
article on this.
>
> 6. Any great tape stories?
>
>
Pass.
--
]DF$
Mac GUI Vault - A source for retro Apple II and
Macintosh computing.
http://macgui.com/vault/
Brian Bernstein
I can point out two interesting uses of the cassette ports that I've seen:
1. The Voice from Muse (which was probably based on Tog's program) allowed you to do basic 1-bit sampling for replay through the speaker.
2. Diversi-Dial was like an IRC chat system where you stuck 300 baud modems (Micromodem II or AppleCat) into every slot. You could increase your number of lines by using a parallel card to link two machines together and get a total of 12 ports instead of 7. The cassette port thing here was that you could run an audio wire between the machines to keep the clocks in sync (simple pulse). Neat.
Never heard of anything more sophisticated than that, though.
mwillegal
On Thursday, August 11, 2011 7:17:25 PM UTC-4, Egan Ford wrote:
> Gents (and Ladies?),
>
> My first Apple was a II+ with floppies. I never got to experience the
> joy or frustration of cassette tape as a volatile storage medium, so I
> thought I'd give it a go and was able to backup and restore a BASIC
> program. However...
The Joy was having a computer, there no particular frustration with tape, since the
tape was all there was that was available and it worked pretty well on the A2.
The release of Disk ][ completely transformed operation of the machine, so once
that came out, the tape was pretty much put aside.
>
> I've been trying to load up a few games from the excellent
> http://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/projects/cassettes/index.html archives on
> my IIe (physical and virtual) and I get ERR. Most likely because most
> of them are INT BASIC. So I booted a 3.3 master and typed INT and
> then LOAD and now I get ERR*** MEM FULL ERR.
>
> Questions:
>
> 1. Can I remove FP and replace with INT BASIC on the IIe without a
> soldering iron, chip extractor, or PROM burner? Will that solve my
> MEM FULL ERR?
>
> 2. If I can do #1, how would I tape load INT BASIC? Can I make a
> tape of INT BASIC? I want to see how far I can take this tape thing.
> E.g. Boot, reset, LOAD INT BASIC, INT, kill FP, LOAD INT game,
> play, ...
I don't know of any tape version of Int Basic. Applesoft was first released
on tape and loaded into memory just above text page 0 of video ram (if I remember
right). You might find a copy of that, and start with that before trying to find a way to
load int basic into a language card from tape.
>
> 3. Can I boot from tape on a IIe? Actually I know I can based on the
> ADTPro instructions. But how would I create a boot tape?
>
> 4. Is there any advanced tape usage/programming information floating
> around? "Beneath Apple Tape?" All I have been able to find was the
> II and II+ tape guides that do little more than cover SAVE and LOAD.
> I did find the audio format on Apple's site (it may be of interest
> later on).
Somewhere there must be some information on saving data on tape from
Basic programs. The Red Book, the Contact newsletter or Apple II reference manual may
have something on those topics.
>
> 5. Any cool hacks, like IIe to IIe networking with audio? Or a token
> passing network with 3 or more IIs?
>
These days you can use an iPod in place of a cassette recorder. See this page.
http://www.apple1notes.com/Home/Notes.html
Also I have created an "C" language program that will convert a text file in Apple monitor format into an AIF file that can be played back with an iPod into an Apple 2. This A1 oriented program doesn't add the checksum byte expected by the A2, but I have still been able to read these AIF files on an A2. You just need to manually break the A2 at the end of the playback and check the last bytes of the load to make sure there hasn't been a bit picked or dropped.
http://www.willegal.net/appleii/apple1-software.htm
> 6. Any great tape stories?
I still have my tapes and a notebook from the pre-floppy days. The notebook contains the location on the tape recorder's counter where I could find a given program on each tape. rewind to beginning of tape, reset tape counter, then fast forward to where the note says the program begins. I also hacked my tape recorder, so I could hear out of the speaker at the same time I was playing back to the computer through the monitor output. Reliability is/was pretty decent. In fact I've been able to play back an original 70's era tape recording of Dragon Maze (see the Red Book) into my Mac and successfully read the recording into the Virtual II emulator.
>
> Thanks.
Regards,
Mike W.
Steve Nickolas
> 2. If I can do #1, how would I tape load INT BASIC? Can I make a
> tape of INT BASIC? I want to see how far I can take this tape thing.
> E.g. Boot, reset, LOAD INT BASIC, INT, kill FP, LOAD INT game,
> play, ...
If you got 64K, it should be possible. A stub program that does the same
job as HELLO on the 1980 system master and relocates BASIC to the language
card, then does the equivalent of an INT ... I don't see why it shouldn't
be.
(I could prolly make one, actually...)
> 3. Can I boot from tape on a IIe? Actually I know I can based on the
> ADTPro instructions. But how would I create a boot tape?
I've created .WAV files that can be set up so that, if you type LOAD and
play them, they do the process of loading, decompressing, and running a
bunch of things ... I actually bootstrapped ProDOS and EHBASIC+ or Copy ][
Plus that way.
-uso.
Steve Nickolas
On Thu, 11 Aug 2011, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Aug 2011, Egan Ford wrote:
>
>> 2. If I can do #1, how would I tape load INT BASIC? Can I make a
>> tape of INT BASIC? I want to see how far I can take this tape thing.
>> E.g. Boot, reset, LOAD INT BASIC, INT, kill FP, LOAD INT game,
>> play, ...
>
> If you got 64K, it should be possible. A stub program that does the same job
> as HELLO on the 1980 system master and relocates BASIC to the language card,
> then does the equivalent of an INT ... I don't see why it shouldn't be.
>
> (I could prolly make one, actually...)
http://xtra.usotsuki.info/intlodr.zip
It's a FLAC inside a ZIP. Try typing LOAD and then piping it out the tape
port. It *should* put you into INTBASIC. Very crude.
-uso.
Michael J. Mahon
> Gents (and Ladies?),
>
> My first Apple was a II+ with floppies. I never got to experience the
> joy or frustration of cassette tape as a volatile storage medium, so I
> thought I'd give it a go and was able to backup and restore a BASIC
> program. However...
>
> I've been trying to load up a few games from the excellent
> http://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/projects/cassettes/index.html archives on
> my IIe (physical and virtual) and I get ERR. Most likely because most
> of them are INT BASIC. So I booted a 3.3 master and typed INT and
> then LOAD and now I get ERR*** MEM FULL ERR.
>
> Questions:
>
> 1. Can I remove FP and replace with INT BASIC on the IIe without a
> soldering iron, chip extractor, or PROM burner? Will that solve my
> MEM FULL ERR?
There's no need if you have 64K. The non-ROM BASIC loads into the same
address range as if it were in ROM.
> 2. If I can do #1, how would I tape load INT BASIC? Can I make a
> tape of INT BASIC? I want to see how far I can take this tape thing.
> E.g. Boot, reset, LOAD INT BASIC, INT, kill FP, LOAD INT game,
> play, ...
Possible--an advanced exercise with little other application.
> 3. Can I boot from tape on a IIe? Actually I know I can based on the
> ADTPro instructions. But how would I create a boot tape?
Also an advanced exercise, since you have to grab control from the cassette
read routine.
> 4. Is there any advanced tape usage/programming information floating
> around? "Beneath Apple Tape?" All I have been able to find was the
> II and II+ tape guides that do little more than cover SAVE and LOAD.
> I did find the audio format on Apple's site (it may be of interest
> later on).
I'd try early newsletters, but you'll probably have to do it yourself, by
reverse-engineering the cassette routines.
> 5. Any cool hacks, like IIe to IIe networking with audio? Or a token
> passing network with 3 or more IIs?
I understand that some limited experiments were done, but nothing very well
developed.
One problem was that an amplifier was needed for each direction of data
flow, since the output is low-level and the input expects a volt or more
(speaker level).
> 6. Any great tape stories?
I used cassettes for BASIC and M/L development for about two and a half
years with no problems at all.
It was very convenient to keep a tape counter log of where each item was on
a C90. I just marched down a tape saving later versions at the end,
retaining a complete history of development!
BTW, my NadaNet doesn't use the cassette ports--it uses the digital I/O on
the game port: one annunciator and one pushbutton input.
-michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon
Moose
> 4. Is there any advanced tape usage/programming information floating
> around? "Beneath Apple Tape?" All I have been able to find was the
> II and II+ tape guides that do little more than cover SAVE and LOAD.
> I did find the audio format on Apple's site (it may be of interest
> later on).
Back in 1981+82, I used tape with my school's Apple ]['s and
compatibles and in 1983 I purchased my own Apple ][+ clone for home
and used tape for almost a year until I saved up and purchased my own
floppy drive.
As well as BASIC, I also worked with machine code stuff on tape.
During the first half of 1983, I could borrow a floppy drive for a
weekend very occasionally, and I would use this to transfer my
favourite machine code games from disk to tape. e.g. Apple Panic,
etc. I still remember the commands now: AA60, AA72, etc and of course
CALL-151 (for a good time), without looking them up and without having
used them for almost 30 years. (I'd have to look up which numbers to
add, etc though). Funny how things stick in your head ....
Years ago (mid-late 1990's ?), I found my old Apple ][ notes and typed
these in and uploaded them to places like Asimov. They included
instructions of loading and saving machine code programs to and from
tape. If these sound interesting for you, have a poke around Asimov.
If you can't find them, let me know and I'll dig through old backups
and find the old text files.
Moose
Egan Ford
Brilliant! Thanks! Now, how did you do that?
Egan Ford
> > I've been trying to load up a few games from the excellent
> > my IIe (physical and virtual) and I get ERR. Most likely because most
> > of them are INT BASIC. So I booted a 3.3 master and typed INT and
> > then LOAD and now I get ERR*** MEM FULL ERR.
>
> You likely need to adjust the tone or volume control of the cassette
> playback machine.
>
> Pages 4 through 9 of the Red Manual
> (online PDF here:http://macgui.com/kb/article/352)
> offer notes on how to load a tape, and also what to do if there are errors.
Thanks for the link. So far no luck with Virtual ][. I've tried to
increase the volume within Virtual ][ as well as increase the volume
with Audacity. I'll keep trying and will try a few other tapes as
well. Lastly I'll try it on the real thing this weekend.
BTW, I get the same error with Virtual ][ as only a II. I do not
think I am truly running out of memory.
> > 3. Can I boot from tape on a IIe? Actually I know I can based on the
> > ADTPro instructions. But how would I create a boot tape?
>
> Not sure what you're asking here. The Apple either loads data into RAM from
> a tape, or dumps a range of its memory back to tape.
Got it.
> > 5. Any cool hacks, like IIe to IIe networking with audio? Or a token
> > passing network with 3 or more IIs?
> There are also some ways to digitize sound using the cassette ports and some
> additional hardware. Try the 1979 compendium, Peeking At Call-Apple for an
> article on this.
Thanks. Found it.
Thanks again for the pointers.
Egan Ford
> This is one of my favorite topics. See my comments inline.
> > passing network with 3 or more IIs?
>
> These days you can use an iPod in place of a cassette recorder. See this page.http://www.apple1notes.com/Home/Notes.html
This is precisely where I was heading with all of this. However I
have had no luck saving to my iPhone 4 or iPad using a purchased Mic/
Headphone breakout cable. The iPhone 4/iPad 2 refuses to recognize
the cassette out of my IIe as a mic. I've tried various hacks. If I
have time I'll try your method this weekend.
I did, BTW, find a solution that works very reliably using USB audio
that I'll be posting to my blog in the new few weeks.
> Also I have created an "C" language program that will convert a text file in Apple monitor format into an AIF file that can be played back with an iPod into an Apple 2. This A1 oriented program doesn't add the checksum byte expected by the A2, but I have still been able to read these AIF files on an A2. You just need to manually break the A2 at the end of the playback and check the last bytes of the load to make sure there hasn't been a bit picked or dropped.http://www.willegal.net/appleii/apple1-software.htm
This I have to play with. Perhaps try to get working with the IIe.
>
> > 6. Any great tape stories?
>
> I still have my tapes and a notebook from the pre-floppy days. The notebook contains the location on the tape recorder's counter where I could find a given program on each tape. rewind to beginning of tape, reset tape counter, then fast forward to where the note says the program begins. I also hacked my tape recorder, so I could hear out of the speaker at the same time I was playing back to the computer through the monitor output. Reliability is/was pretty decent. In fact I've been able to play back an original 70's era tape recording of Dragon Maze (see the Red Book) into my Mac and successfully read the recording into the Virtual II emulator.
Now you just need the counter to have a serial interface so that you
can use your Apple to skip to the proper place automatically. In the
80's I worked with Alpha Micros. The OS and app updates came via VHS
tape. Radio Shack created a player with a serial port (for control
only) that made the use of VHS tape a bit more automated.
Thanks again.
Eric Rucker
> Not sure what you're asking here. The Apple either loads data into RAM from
> a tape, or dumps a range of its memory back to tape.
Interestingly, there are ways to do more stupid computer tricks, just by loading into the right range of memory, and those tricks were used for various things, ranging from executing the program without having to do xxxxG in the monitor, all the way up to primitive copy protection schemes: http://www.fadden.com/techmisc/cassette-protect.htm
Michael J. Mahon
> On Aug 11, 6:37 pm, dog_...@macgui.com (D Finnigan) wrote:
>>> I've been trying to load up a few games from the excellent
>>> http://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/projects/cassettes/index.htmlarchives on
>>> my IIe (physical and virtual) and I get ERR. Most likely because most
>>> of them are INT BASIC. So I booted a 3.3 master and typed INT and
>>> then LOAD and now I get ERR*** MEM FULL ERR.
>>
>> You likely need to adjust the tone or volume control of the cassette
>> playback machine.
>>
>> Pages 4 through 9 of the Red Manual
>> (online PDF here:http://macgui.com/kb/article/352)
>> offer notes on how to load a tape, and also what to do if there are errors.
>
> Thanks for the link. So far no luck with Virtual ][. I've tried to
> increase the volume within Virtual ][ as well as increase the volume
> with Audacity. I'll keep trying and will try a few other tapes as
> well. Lastly I'll try it on the real thing this weekend.
>
> BTW, I get the same error with Virtual ][ as only a II. I do not
> think I am truly running out of memory.
You aren't--it's an error in the length bytes.
The cassette interface requires glitch-free sound, which many emulators
cannot provide. A real Apple is the only way to go.
Steve Nickolas
I started with this block of assembler (the "monrom.bin" is actually an 8K
Apple ][ monitor ROM). Then I used some tools I have that wrap the
compression tool "Exomizer" so that it can be used for Apple ][ instead of
C64 (they both have 6502-derived CPUs, they use similar BASICs, they both
start code at $0801 - so it's fairly trivial), and to convert the output
into a LOADable WAV file. (There's a lot of voodoo involved. I can
prolly dig up my tools.)
The "haslc" code is disassembled from the 1980 DOS 3.3 system master.
Most of the remainder is translated from the HELLO program on the same
disk.
The header is set up with "autorun" - so all you need to do is LOAD it.
-uso.
.org $E80
entry: jsr test
lda haslc
cmp #$01
bne @1
jsr movbas
lda $C083
lda $C083
jmp $E000
@1: lda haslc
tay
beq @2
ldy #mnorel
@2: lda messages, y
beq @3
ora #$80
jsr $FDED
iny
bne @2
@3: jmp $FF69
messages:
mnolc = *-messages ; 0 - assumed above
.byte 13, 7, "64K RAM REQUIRED", 13, 0
mnorel = *-messages
.byte 13, 7, "LC LOCKED UNTIL REBOOT", 13, 0
haslc: .byte 0
test: lda $E000
pha
lda $C081
pla
pha
cmp $E000
bne @1
lda $C083
lda $C083
lda #$A5
sta $D000
cmp $D000
bne @1
lsr
sta $D000
cmp $D000
bne @1
lda $C081
lda $C081
lda #$01
bne @2
@1: lda #$00
@2: sta haslc
pla
cmp $E000
beq @3
lda $C080
@3: rts
movbas: ldy #$00
@1: lda $1000, y
sta $E000, y
lda $1100, y
sta $E100, y
lda $1200, y
sta $E200, y
lda $1300, y
sta $E300, y
lda $1400, y
sta $E400, y
lda $1500, y
sta $E500, y
lda $1600, y
sta $E600, y
lda $1700, y
sta $E700, y
lda $1800, y
sta $E800, y
lda $1900, y
sta $E900, y
lda $1A00, y
sta $EA00, y
lda $1B00, y
sta $EB00, y
lda $1C00, y
sta $EC00, y
lda $1D00, y
sta $ED00, y
lda $1E00, y
sta $EE00, y
lda $1F00, y
sta $EF00, y
lda $2000, y
sta $F000, y
lda $2100, y
sta $F100, y
lda $2200, y
sta $F200, y
lda $2300, y
sta $F300, y
lda $2400, y
sta $F400, y
lda $2500, y
sta $F500, y
lda $2600, y
sta $F600, y
lda $2700, y
sta $F700, y
lda $2800, y
sta $F800, y
lda $2900, y
sta $F900, y
lda $2A00, y
sta $FA00, y
lda $2B00, y
sta $FB00, y
lda $2C00, y
sta $FC00, y
lda $2D00, y
sta $FD00, y
lda $2E00, y
sta $FE00, y
lda $2F00, y
sta $FF00, y
iny
beq @2
jmp @1
@2: rts
.asciiz "hacked by usotsuki"
.res $1000-*, $EA
.incbin "monrom.bin"
Steve Nickolas
I created the tape image for INTLODR under Linux. With direct control of
the file I used one of these dirty tricks: the "protect" bit is set, so it
autoruns. (It's a binary program in a BASIC wrapper. This is rare on the
Apple but common as hell on the C64, which is what the compression tool I
used was intended for.)
-uso.
D Finnigan
>
> BTW, my NadaNet doesn't use the cassette ports--it uses the digital I/O on
> the game port: one annunciator and one pushbutton input.
>
Hm, well I must have gotten it confused with some other networking scheme
that does make use of the cassette jacks. I know I've read of one
somewhere...
--
]DF$
Mac GUI Vault - A source for retro Apple II and
Macintosh computing.
http://macgui.com/vault/
Egan Ford
> Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>
> > BTW, my NadaNet doesn't use the cassette ports--it uses the digital I/O on
> > the game port: one annunciator and one pushbutton input.
>
> Hm, well I must have gotten it confused with some other networking scheme
> that does make use of the cassette jacks. I know I've read of one
> somewhere...
Perhaps here: http://bob-bishop.awardspace.com/CassettePorts/index.html
Michael J. Mahon
> Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>>
>> BTW, my NadaNet doesn't use the cassette ports--it uses the digital I/O on
>> the game port: one annunciator and one pushbutton input.
>>
>
> Hm, well I must have gotten it confused with some other networking scheme
> that does make use of the cassette jacks. I know I've read of one
> somewhere...
The only one I know of was 1) a long time ago and 2) very rudimentary. If
you know of a more recent one, I'm very interested.
NadaNet is fairly advanced. For example, in a single AppleSoft statement,
you can copy an arbitrarily large block of memory from one machine to
another at a speed in excess of 10KB per second.
Michael J. Mahon
That's the one I know of. It's more of an experiment than a network.
There was also a two-Apple game that used the cassette ports to
communicate, but all such methods require external amplifiers, and none
I've heard of connected more than two machines.
Egan Ford
Do you know where I can find P.A.C.K. referenced in the article? The
article mentioned faster I/O via cassette ports in P.A.C.K. Several
searches have yielded nothing.