Re: Hardware gadget for tape loading

[Philip Kendall <pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk>]

In article <37e4001c.23967336@news.wxs.nl>, Ernest R. Schreurs
<ernest@wxs.nl> wrote
>On Sat, 18 Sep 1999 12:55:19 GMT, greenaum@BOLLOCKSyahoo.co.uk wrote:
>
>>I think the TZX format is flexible enough to hold other computers'
>>formats, have a look at the specs and see if it's suitable. It would
>>be quite good to see a common tape format, it would mean the utilities
>>for digitising and re-tapifying tapes, could be centralised and have
>>much more time put into them, better sampling techniques, etc, so
>>everything would be better.
>
>Well, I did not know of this format or these utilities.  I looked at
>the format specification, and to me it looks very complicated.
>Flexible yes, but also very very complicated.

IMHO, it's not complicated. You never need to use most of the block
types -- most Speccy games can get by with using just one or two.

(I'll admit that the .tzx format is a bit of a mess in places eg the
fact that the early block types don't have length bytes :-( )

>>Can TZX have meta data put in it, so you can store what computer it's
>>for and who sampled it etc? I know I could just go look it up but it
>>needs bringing up anyway.
>
>I think this is possible.  But I do not know why anyone would want
>this.  Tapes for one system cannot be loaded on another system.

Yes, they can! It's normally a software problem, not a hardware problem.
There isn't the software built into most machines to allow you to do
this, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been written in the past.

Example 1: There are plenty of *Spectrum* programs which allow you to
load ZX81 tapes on a Spectrum; as there's no fundamental difference in
the hardware, all that is needed for someone to take an old Spectrum
program, run it on their emulator and then start up the ZX81 tape file.
If we were using different tape formats for every machine, this would
not be possible, as it would require rewriting the emulator (or
producing some external utility to do this), which a fair proportion of
emulator users may not be able to do.

Example 2: The Spectrum and Commodore 64 versions of Trivial Pursuit
used the same data format to load extra sets of questions.1

>I think it is very confusing to store all sorts of tape files for
>different machines in the same format.  Like, I have a ton of
>diskettes. [...] Sometimes it is hard to tell what is what.
>The same problem would arise with these emulated cassettes.

To be honest, that's more of a organisational problem -- the biggest
Spectrum archive is now running at ~12000 programs, so there are already
some very efficient tools around for dealing with this sort of thing.

Phil

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