Re: RAM Applesoft found!

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

Linards Ticmanis wrote:
> Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>
> > Very likely a head alignment problem in your recorder...
>
>
> Maybe. It's good enough for music tapes though. And I noticed that the 
> Apple tape played much less loud than the new copy I produced with the 
> Commodore Datasette in an early attempt to get this working. Do tapes 
> get softer over time as the magnetization averages itself out maybe? Or 
> maybe Apple tapes are just by nature less loud than Commodore tapes.

They can, but this is much less usual than "print through", in which
the sound/data on adjacent tape wraps is weakly imprinted on the tape.

The alignment doesn't have to be off by much to degrade the high
frequency response enough to bother the Apple read routine.  I have
also encountered "professionally" duplicated cassettes that were
recorded with bad alignment--I had to misalign a deck to recover
the data from that one!

The Apple read routine is quite tolerant of recording level differences,
as long as the playback machine can be turned up to compensate.  The
net effect is a little loss in signal-to-noise ratio, but that's not
usually a problem.

-michael

Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it is seriously underused."