Using Atari XC12 to play ATR or XEX files?

[Arkanoid_376970]

Hi all!

Its been a while since ive been on as exams and my final year have prevented my use of my 600xl. Recently i got an Atari XC12 Tape drive and was wondering if there is any method to write a .atr or .xex file to tape using my sony TCM 939 tape recorder from my PC. Are there any sound concerters like tap2wav for the C64?

 

 

Thanks

 

Arka

[+orpheuswaking]

you would need to locate .CAS files

[Alphasys]

you would need to locate .CAS files

 

CAS-files are indeed one option. But unless those contain BASIC files, they are most probably single-load boot files of a sort, meaning you have to hold START (+Option if basic needs to be disabled) to load those.

 

ATR files are usually not suitable for transfer to cassette, since these are diskimages, containing more files, and usually needing the random access functions that a diskdrive has, which a cassette can't mimic.

 

XEX (or EXE/COM files) use a loading method that a DOS can handle, but the Atari can't use without a DOS. There is however a program I used quite extensively back in the day when a tape-recorder was the only peripheral I had. It's called BL/C, and is a bootable program, loadable from cassette, that'll give this DOS-like binary load functionality for Tape. I used to have 2 versions of this program, one was version 0.2, the other 0.8. Nowadays, I only seem to have a selector disk-image with a BL/C 0.9 on there, but how that could be put on tape, I'm not sure.

 

Atari800WinPLus will output the dual tone when "saving to cassette", but doesn't make the datablock-noises. Altirra can do that though. You could then record the sound produced by Altirra, and record that on tape, so stuff will work. To test this, I've made and uploaded this zipped WAV-file of BL/C 0.9 using Altirra and some sound recording software. Maybe you can try that first. If it works, pretty much all XEX-files could be transferred to cassette and loaded with this preloader program. Record it to tape, and hold OPTION+START on boot.

 

If you have CAS files, use a utility like CAS2WAV or A8CAS to make a soundfile you could then record on tape. I think there's also an EXE2CAS program somewhere, or was it EXE2WAV... Not sure. It's been ages since I could use original hardware, so I'm not into these kinds of programs.

 

A word of warning though: Some of these files will be HUGE! I've once saved the XEX-file of Master of the Lamps to tape, which due to its structure needed to be saved with long inter-record gaps. This took over 45 minutes of tape, and even longer to load, because the tape would be stopped and restarted between each block.

Edited August 12, 2011 by Alphasys

[rost]

Are there any sound concerters like tap2wav for the C64?

Yes it's called cas2wav and can be found here.