CCS64 Commodore 64 Emulator Question

[christo930]

I have been playing around with .tap files (the full ones that have the encoded data and not just prg programs in a tap format identical to prg.

 

When you load the games in the emulator via the tape, you get a C2N counter that comes up on the screen. It's not the tape position counter, because the number is way to big and moving far too quickly. At first I thought it was counting bits, but I have some programs that go well over 600,000 or 73.24...KB ((600,000/8)/1024). It's also confusing because the counting begins right away before the emulated 64 even finds X on tape and doesn't reset then or even after loading a fast loader or a screen/song to watch/listen to as the game loads. The only other things I can think of is the timer signal that mark the beginning and end of bits or that there is a lot of overhead for error correction. I looked through the help file and the CCS64 website, but I didn't find anything of what this counter is and what it's indicating. I know this Atariage, but I assume most users here like C64 games as well. If anyone can enlighten me or point me in the right direction, I'd appreciate it. Also, I have an XA transfer cable and a parallel port on my PC and could write out disk images (as well as a floppy drive to write 1581 disk images for my 1581), so I am really doing it to check it out on the real hardware.

 

I have my Dataset from 1982 or so when I was 13, but disks were the preferred medium in the US and the Dataset in the US (without all of those fast-laoders in Europe were incredibly slow. I had a racing game that took about 45 minutes to load) were too slow to be practical. Some of my original disks have failed and I only have cracked versions and I also want to check out the various fast loaders, particularly ones with music and graphics on real hardware and also play games that hasn't been cracked (no tampering). I was thinking of using a tap to wav software, burn the wav files to an audio cd and using a cassette converter, but are these converters 'good enough'? Also, I hear that MP3 files might not be reliable, but what about a 320KB/s with VBR encoding? I have an old iPod which would be great for this project if VBR high bit-rate mp3 files would work. Does anyone have any experience with this part of it? Also, what Wav to MP3 would be best and hopefully has the ability to encode without cropping high frequency tones, which from what I read is the problem with MP3s. This would obviously make it more compact.

[Rybags]

The counter is probably just indicitive and might work differently depending on how the Tap file is encoded, e.g. standard, turbo and whether it's just the raw data or has extra info.

 

People report success using tape adaptors and modern media players, it's probably a case of try lowering the bitrate until it fails. Tapes tend to be highish frequency but very predictable waveforms when the file is software generated which should lend fairly well to compression. Also you should only need to use mono rather than stereo which will save more space.

Edited October 20, 2014 by Rybags