+Larry Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 I have several old NTSC cassettes that I would like to make into CAS images. As I understand it I need to 1) Create a WAV file using suitable Windows software. 2) Use the WAV2CAS program to convert the WAV file to CAS format. Has anyone here actually done this, and if so what equipment and MP3 software did you use? I'm using an XC-12 cassette drive and likely using an ATI card for the audio in. Any tips/suggestions would be most welcome. Thanks, Larry Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
www.atarimania.com Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 (edited) What titles do you have? Check this link for the basics: http://www.atarimania.com/atarimania_board...topic.php?t=870 -- Atari Frog http://www.atarimania.com Edited March 24, 2007 by www.atarimania.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Larry Posted March 24, 2007 Author Share Posted March 24, 2007 What titles do you have? Check this link for the basics: http://www.atarimania.com/atarimania_board...topic.php?t=870 -- Atari Frog http://www.atarimania.com That looks like a great "how-to." Thanks. -Larry Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
www.atarimania.com Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 A number of people have been sending us CAS files lately and we regularly upload what we have as well. What are the tapes you want to dump? -- Atari Frog http://www.atarimania.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curt Vendel Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 What about Atari cassette progrms that are dual track and have voice as well as data? For instance - Conversational French or Invitation to Programming ? Has anyone transferred and combined both tracks to allow for proper use of such cassette based programs through emulation or just for achival purposes? Curt A number of people have been sending us CAS files lately and we regularly upload what we have as well. What are the tapes you want to dump? -- Atari Frog http://www.atarimania.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tezz Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 (edited) Does anyone have a guide for correctly digitising the wav image for use with wav2cas? Most of my work is on disk but some very old games I produced is still stuck on tape. I've not had success yet trying to image these. I've tried various sampling bit rates and also stereo/mono (either channel) combinations. Maybe my tapes are totally degraded? or can they only be successfully read with an Atari datarecorder (i've got my 1010 and xc12 in storage) Edited March 24, 2007 by Tezz Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr.Bacardi Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 What about Atari cassette progrms that are dual track and have voice as well as data? For instance - Conversational French or Invitation to Programming ? Has anyone transferred and combined both tracks to allow for proper use of such cassette based programs through emulation or just for achival purposes? Curt That's a very good question ! I just started to convert "programmieren leicht gemacht" by Atari Deutschland which has also a voice track. (btw, is it the german version of "Invitation to programming" ?). I already converted left voice channel to mp3, but as spoken voice is synchronized to the Atari program I don't know what to do exactly... Do you have to play Winamp parallel to Atari800Win ? Is this the only way ? Does anyone have a guide for correctly digitising the wav image for use with wav2cas? Most of my work is on disk but some very old games I produced is still stuck on tape. I've not had success yet trying to image these. I've tried various sampling bit rates and also stereo/mono (either channel) combinations. Maybe my tapes are totally degraded? or can they only be successfully read with an Atari datarecorder (i've got my 1010 and xc12 in storage) I got pretty good results with sampling right channel to 8 bit 44,1 khz . But it seems some games also require to turn fast SIO off in emulator to load correctly :-( Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curt Vendel Posted March 25, 2007 Share Posted March 25, 2007 This is certainly an interesting challenge and something that should be addressed as cassettes are far more vulnerable to distortion and loss then their disk counterparts, its important we all work to preserve the cassette - only interactive programs, the dual track data/voice feature of the 410/1010/XC11-12 data cassettes is a really downplayed and often unknown feature of the 8bits and quite frankly it is a very powerful and innovative feature of the computer line that made many programs far more advanced and usable then anyone else had ever done. This is especially true for the programming and educational series cassettes and the tutorials for programs like the Atari WordProcessor and Atari Financial System which were some of the most professional packaged and designed programs Atari ever produced during the 800 series introduction. Curt What about Atari cassette progrms that are dual track and have voice as well as data? For instance - Conversational French or Invitation to Programming ? Has anyone transferred and combined both tracks to allow for proper use of such cassette based programs through emulation or just for achival purposes? Curt That's a very good question ! I just started to convert "programmieren leicht gemacht" by Atari Deutschland which has also a voice track. (btw, is it the german version of "Invitation to programming" ?). I already converted left voice channel to mp3, but as spoken voice is synchronized to the Atari program I don't know what to do exactly... Do you have to play Winamp parallel to Atari800Win ? Is this the only way ? Does anyone have a guide for correctly digitising the wav image for use with wav2cas? Most of my work is on disk but some very old games I produced is still stuck on tape. I've not had success yet trying to image these. I've tried various sampling bit rates and also stereo/mono (either channel) combinations. Maybe my tapes are totally degraded? or can they only be successfully read with an Atari datarecorder (i've got my 1010 and xc12 in storage) I got pretty good results with sampling right channel to 8 bit 44,1 khz . But it seems some games also require to turn fast SIO off in emulator to load correctly :-( Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ijor Posted March 25, 2007 Share Posted March 25, 2007 What about Atari cassette progrms that are dual track and have voice as well as data? That's a very good question ! I just started to convert "programmieren leicht gemacht" by Atari Deutschland which has also a voice track. (btw, is it the german version of "Invitation to programming" ?). I already converted left voice channel to mp3, but as spoken voice is synchronized to the Atari program I don't know what to do exactly... Do you have to play Winamp parallel to Atari800Win ? Is this the only way ? Until somebody would develop and establish a standard, the only way to preserve them is to made a stereo recording and keep it in a looseless format. Later you could extract each channel to whatever format you would need. For verification purposes you could run wav2cas, but do not discard the original audio format. The only problem is that each tape dump would be quite big in size. If you want, you can try using some codec compression. After compressing you should verify that the data channel wasn't degradated enough and that wav2cas can still read it ok. If it does, then you can discard the huge uncompressed file. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
classics Posted March 25, 2007 Share Posted March 25, 2007 Since the PC can easily play audio I can try to add this feature to APE. The new USB interface also has motor control support, so if the tapes have automated starts and stops that should work as well. Only problem is I don't have any of these cassettes. If someone can make a nice high quality stereo WAV of one of these sets I'll give it a shot. Steve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
a8isa1 Posted March 26, 2007 Share Posted March 26, 2007 (edited) I have several old NTSC cassettes that I would like to make into CAS images. As I understand it I need to 1) Create a WAV file using suitable Windows software. 2) Use the WAV2CAS program to convert the WAV file to CAS format. Has anyone here actually done this, and if so what equipment and MP3 software did you use? I'm using an XC-12 cassette drive and likely using an ATI card for the audio in. Any tips/suggestions would be most welcome. Thanks, Larry - Just my opinion but I think MagoTrans made better .CAS files than WAV2CAS for me. - CAS2CAS was helpful for recovering files with bad blocks. You need more than one sample for this to work. You can get two samples by recording left and right channels seperately. If you are lucky the any dropouts on the tape don't occur at the same point on both channels. Strangely, the program requires two .CAS files + one .HEX file OR 3 .HEX files. Two of the files can repesent the same sample if that's all you have. - Don't recall if any games had a duplicate copy of the program on side B of the casette but if so that would give you two more samples. You could record both channels blended as mono to give you a third sample. Don't know if this will gain you anything, though. CAS2CAS allowed me to finally convert one really troublesome commerical program and a few of my own personal tapes. - Earnest Shreurs, author of WAV2CAS, recommended to stick to 8 bit sampling when recording as 16 bit sampling only produces more bytes and does not aid in WAV2CAS' performance. - Supposedly .WAV recording levels don't affect WAV2CAS (or MagoTrans) but I'm convinced using a preamp to tweak helped, a little. BTW, I used my sound-card's line-in and software that was included with the sound card, a tape deck, and a receiver (as the preamp). - Steve Sheppard Edited March 26, 2007 by a8isa1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+kheller2 Posted March 26, 2007 Share Posted March 26, 2007 Anyone care to look at the schematics for the 1010 and guess what the ADCesque sampled at? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Larry Posted March 28, 2007 Author Share Posted March 28, 2007 - Just my opinion but I think MagoTrans made better .CAS files than WAV2CAS for me. - CAS2CAS was helpful for recovering files with bad blocks. You need more than one sample for this to work. You can get two samples by recording left and right channels seperately. If you are lucky the any dropouts on the tape don't occur at the same point on both channels. Strangely, the program requires two .CAS files + one .HEX file OR 3 .HEX files. Two of the files can repesent the same sample if that's all you have. (snip...) BTW, I used my sound-card's line-in and software that was included with the sound card, a tape deck, and a receiver (as the preamp). - Steve Sheppard Hi Steve- Thanks for the info. I had never heard of MagoTrans before. I'm not sure that I have a cassette deck in the house right now -- perhaps in the garage. But one way or another, I'll give this a try. -Larry Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
a8isa1 Posted April 1, 2007 Share Posted April 1, 2007 Hey Larry, I completely missed the fact that you actually have an Atari cassette. This gives you more options fro producing CAS files. A program could read from the cassette and produce CAS files, though I'm not aware of a such program. The reading of raw data would not be difficult. I'm not sure what's included in the CAS data format. Another option is the ATART interface. Part of this build appears to be similar to a 1050-2-PC interface. It's intended to connect an Atari cassette to to a PC for direct conversion of tapes to CAS files. No intermediate WAV recording is required. ATART doubles as a single-chip MAX232 SIO2PC. There is another component which can be added to the Atari Cassette player which turns it into part of two way interface with your PC. Together ATART and the modified cassette player allow you to use your PC as full cassette emulator. Why would you want this? Well, the CAS format is nice but the CAS playback programs (for use on real Ataris) don't emulate starting and stoping of a tape under Atari control. Hence, some programs will not work. - Steve Sheppard Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Larry Posted April 2, 2007 Author Share Posted April 2, 2007 Hey Larry, I completely missed the fact that you actually have an Atari cassette. This gives you more options fro producing CAS files. A program could read from the cassette and produce CAS files, though I'm not aware of a such program. The reading of raw data would not be difficult. I'm not sure what's included in the CAS data format. Another option is the ATART interface. Part of this build appears to be similar to a 1050-2-PC interface. It's intended to connect an Atari cassette to to a PC for direct conversion of tapes to CAS files. No intermediate WAV recording is required. ATART doubles as a single-chip MAX232 SIO2PC. There is another component which can be added to the Atari Cassette player which turns it into part of two way interface with your PC. Together ATART and the modified cassette player allow you to use your PC as full cassette emulator. Why would you want this? Well, the CAS format is nice but the CAS playback programs (for use on real Ataris) don't emulate starting and stopping of a tape under Atari control. Hence, some programs will not work. - Steve Sheppard Hi Steve- Well, how cool is that! I've been procrastinating (as usual!) thinking that I'll have to dig out a cassette deck to do this. I also had never heard of ATART. How did you happen to run across this? Pretty slick tool! -Larry Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
a8isa1 Posted April 2, 2007 Share Posted April 2, 2007 Hey Larry, I completely missed the fact that you actually have an Atari cassette. This gives you more options fro producing CAS files. A program could read from the cassette and produce CAS files, though I'm not aware of a such program. The reading of raw data would not be difficult. I'm not sure what's included in the CAS data format. Another option is the ATART interface. Part of this build appears to be similar to a 1050-2-PC interface. It's intended to connect an Atari cassette to to a PC for direct conversion of tapes to CAS files. No intermediate WAV recording is required. ATART doubles as a single-chip MAX232 SIO2PC. There is another component which can be added to the Atari Cassette player which turns it into part of two way interface with your PC. Together ATART and the modified cassette player allow you to use your PC as full cassette emulator. Why would you want this? Well, the CAS format is nice but the CAS playback programs (for use on real Ataris) don't emulate starting and stopping of a tape under Atari control. Hence, some programs will not work. - Steve Sheppard Hi Steve- Well, how cool is that! I've been procrastinating (as usual!) thinking that I'll have to dig out a cassette deck to do this. I also had never heard of ATART. How did you happen to run across this? Pretty slick tool! -Larry I don't believe I found ATART information. A couple of years ago I was asking for information about WAV2CAS. Vladimir Tichy (sp?) reponded and provided information for his ATART. I think he was under the impression that I still owned an Atari cassette player. I didn't own enough tapes to justify replacing my 410 and building ATART and when I finally made a working CAS files for Epyx Crush, Crumble and Chomp and Analog Software Shooting Gallery then I didn't have any need for ATART at all. BTW, Atari Frog actually beat me to the punch with his own conversion of C, C and C, the one posted at Atarimania.com. I later realized my version is slightly different and older so I sent him a copy. - Steve Sheppard Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
www.atarimania.com Posted April 2, 2007 Share Posted April 2, 2007 Steve, it seems we didn't even post the version you sent us! Sorry about that, I realize it's still on my hard drive! I'll upload it ASAP! -- Atari Frog http://www.atarimania.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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