Re: Many questions about cassette tapes

[Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Egan Ford <datajerk@gmail.com> 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...
> 
> 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