Michael J. Mahon wrote:
If you want the tape images, then .wav files or (apparently) *good* .mp3 files are the way to go. CiderPress can extract the programs and data from cassette audio files to disk images.
There's really nothing that would stop .TAP images, common in the Commodore emulation world, to be usable for Apple II as well. You need to preserve half-waves on the Apple I think, like for the Commodore C16/Plus4 systems. The file format could easily be extended to handle Apple tapes, and it should be a pretty quick fix for most emulators to support them. Plus, they're much shorter than WAVs and can be "cleaned up" so they compress well. The file format has a simple header followed by single bytes, each giving the length of one individual wave (or half-wave), in units of 8 CPU cycles IIRC. That proved to be exact enough for all known fast-loaders and copy protection schemes. Longer pauses are indicated by a zero byte, followed by an 48 bit number (three bytes) giving the length of the pause in CPU cycles.
The clean-up process consists of adjusting all lenghts, which tend to vary a bit through tape speed variations and such, to the theoretically exact values. The program "FinalTAP" can do this automatically for many common Commodore fast-loaders and copy protection schemes.
-- Linards Ticmanis