Backing up tapes to disk

[glitch]

I broke out my collection of tapes and have found that quite a few of them are suffering from bit rot. At first I thought it might be my tape decks. My 1010 was bought 2nd hand and my 410 was starting to have problems "back in the day" so I bought a new 1010 and it was able to read a few of the tapes the other couldn't but not all.

 

I've managed to back up my Avalon Hill games & other basic carts except for a few that I couldn't get to read at all. Does anyone know of a way to back up non-basic tapes? I have about 20 or so. Some of them I know I can buy again in disc or cart form if I have to but I'm not sure about all of them.

[Nukey Shay]

Sure...use a modern tape deck to dub them to another cassette (preferably chrome...don't use those generic cheapos). Often, the tape itself has creases put on it by the pinch roller of the tape player when it was prematurely halted. I dunno about most 410s/1010s, but mine would crash right on a crease every time. So dub them over to a fresh cassette, and don't forget to rewind them

Emulators also have cassette support, so you could record them as .wav's, use the WAV2CAS utility to convert them into .cas images, and back them up to disk via SIO2PC

WAV2CAS here:

http://home.planet.nl/~ernest/atarixle.html

[Rob Mitchell]

Back in the day I had a cassette program that after loaded into the Atari 800, I could then load ANY cassette and then dump a fresh copy back to the cassette recorder. Terrible that I threw away all my cassettes years ago.

 

Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA

[Nukey Shay]

Was it Alpha System's COS? I have it too. You could also transfer the files to disk.

[glitch]

Thanks for the replies. I'm going to try to copy the tapes this weekend. Unfortunatly the only dual tape deck I have anymore is an old boombox at my office that I haven't played a tape in in years. I have an old program that runs in basic from the "pirates library" that supposedly can copy cassettes to disc but it gets an error 170 when ever it goes to write to the disc. I haven't started debuging it yet. Does anyone have an idea where I might find a copy of COS? or any other utilities?

 

I ordered a sio2pc cable last week. It should be in soon but I assume that 800 wouldn't read the .cas files outputed from wav2cas as an actual executable. I havent used that utility but I thought it was primarily for emulators.

[Nukey Shay]

Error 170 translates to "file not found"...you should list the program and check lines that have OPEN or XIO lines in them. It's highly likely that it's reading...

OPEN #1,4,0,FILE$

 

...instead of...

OPEN #1,8,0,FILE$

 

See the difference? The top one is trying to read the file (but it hasn't been created yet). The bottom one creates a file. Take care that the lines you change are ones involving the disk drive, since the OPEN statement can also be used with the cassette drive (which would try to erase your tape if you change the wrong one). I think that it would prompt you to press RECORD instead of PLAY in that case...generating another error. Regardless, use a backup tape for testing

Post a few lines if you get stuck

 

Anyway, I have a copy of COS around here someplace if that doesn't work out. Though I have to dig for it I sent my original to Carmel Andrews (whatever happened to him?) on the understanding that it was going to be archived someplace...but that apparently never happened.

Coo-ee...Carmel...are you out there?

 

Never got my packet of Smarties either