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Virtual cassette ---> Wav files for the EACA Colour Genie?

T

tezza

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Hi,

This request is a long shot, but I'll give it a go anyway...

I've recently acquired an EACA Colour Genie, which I'm having a good time playing around with.

One problem is I have no Colour Genie software. However I DO have the colour Genie Emulator (Colour Emu 3.0) which comes with some software as cassette images. In the emulator's readme.txt file, the authors (Burkhard Lehner and Stephan Scholz) say the following....


"Transferring software :
***********************
If you have old Colour Genie tapes, you can load them directly into the PC using an ordinary tape recorder, the SoundBlaster and the CASSLOAD tool. You may have to adjust the volume and/or tape recorder header, but
good tapes should be readable. You can get CASSLOAD from our WWW site along with another useful tool called ANALYSE. It analyses CAS-files and checks if there are any errors. Moreover, there is a program called CASSSAVE which converts CAS-Files to VOC-Files which can be used for loading programs into the Colour Genie (the original machine) - you can even save them on tape."

That sounds like just what I need! Theoretically, this would allow me to use those cassette images that are bundled with the emulator and use them on my own real machine.


However, the problem is the website (http://www.student.uni-kl.de/~sscholz/ColourGenie.html) has been dead for some time, and no website I can find which deals with the colour genie mentions these tools at all! Did anyone on this list ever download the above tools, or know if they still exist somewhere?

Or have any other suggestions?


Terry
 
Currently the Internet Archive seems down but otherwise you could try to find archived copies of Stephan Scholz' old web pages. Searching on his name and "genie" returns a few hits, of which none contains the applications you're looking for.
 
I'm not sure where this helps, but I download titles for my ZX Spectrum and they are .tap files, I then use a utility called tap2wav which converts them to Wav files (if you can get your Genie files to Wav's already that's great :)

I burn the Wav's to CD as an Audio file using Nero, and then load them from the CD into my Spectrum using a standard portable CD player.

If your recording Genie programs from tape through a sound card can't you record them as Wav's to start with using Goldwave or something similar ?

Just a few thoughts.
 
Download MESS (Multiple Emulator Super System), extract it to a directory, navigate to that directory in command prompt, & use the executable imgtool.exe to convert the files to WAV.
 
Hm, does MESS know all higher level data formats? That's mighty cool, but I somehow doubt this. Panther's advice is great, if only the Colour Genie and ZX Spectrum had been software and audio compatible... ;-)

What Tezza has is a collection of bitwise higher level representations of computer software, and wants to convert them to audio signals as recognized by the particular computer in question. Different computers used different baud rates, signal frequencies etc. The MESS imgtool may be able to generate a WAV file with specifying which rates and frequencies to use for each 0 and 1, so if you know these technical specs it could be handy. This is just speculation from my part, and for that matter it may already have support for all file formats related to the emulated computer systems.

In any case, the Internet Archive is back online, and just as speculated, it has archived Stephan's old pages including the downloadable files. Thus, you will be able to grab tools30.zip from their site. Good luck!
 
If they're already .wav files, why not just play them directly into the cassette input thru your sound card's line out via a patch cord? Works for me, once you figger out the correct volume setting (just like the original). I've done this with wav & mp3 files, both to save the tapes, and to reload them (on other computers).

--T
 
Thanks for all the advice guys! And thanks also for the archive link to the tools package. Another discussion group I posted to found it first, but I appreciate the effort. There is certainly value in archiving the web!

The Colour Genie emulator virtual cassette files are not in Wav format. They have the extension *.cas and although they share that extension with a host of other emulators I would doubt if the format's the same. As I said earlier, the problem is to get these into a Wav format so I can push them through the soundcard onto tape, which I can then load on my real machine (for which I have no software).

Anyway I now have the casssave.exe program, which I've found actually converts the *.cas image to a VOC file, which I'll then need to covert to a Wav (I've found software to do this). So hopefully this 5-step process will work (*.cas--> VOC---> Wav----> audio tape---> Colour Genie).


I'll give it a go this weekend and let you know. I'll try the MESS one out as well.


Terry
 
Tezza, if you can get them to Wav's then depending on the cassette input method (on the spectrum this was 3.5mm jack plug), wouldn't you be best burning them to CD ?

Not any quicker loading, spectrum software still takes 5 mins to load, but quicker to write to CD than tape.
 
Eventually, I will probably look for similar applications for a few of my retro computers too. I have the Commodore line more than covered, and floppy based Acorns hopefully too. I have found and used UEF software for Acorn tapes. I suppose I will look into getting a SIO2PC cable for the Atari's and skip tapes altogether. Dunno about MSX, but it should be well covered.

That leaves the hard work to finding transfer software for the Comx-35. Perhaps someone has reverse engineered the format, just that I haven't had a look yet. I have a feeling it would be about as scarce as the Colour Genie one.
 
Well, I've managed to do it. Converting the VOCs to Wavs wasn't that successful but casssave.exe had this option where you could output the *.cas contents directly out to the soundcard as audio. I found the sound broke up in Windows XP but it DID output smoothly in DOSBox. And there is more...DOSBox could also capture this sound output in a wave file! (Yay!!)

It worked! I put the Genie's cassette input jack into the earphone jack on my laptop, ran casssave.exe with a CAS image in DOSBox and the programs loaded in the real machine just fine. I then tried loading the program again into the real machine except this time with the captured WAV file using a Wav editor (Audacity), just as an extra checked. That worked too!

So now I have a handful of colour genie programs as WAV files which I know will run on the physical machine (I only wish I had manuals for the utilities). I've got a whole lot more programs on virtual colour genie disk files I can transfer to cassette images, then do the same thing with. So by the end of this weekend, I should have 30-40 programs or so! Great!

I tried putting these WAVS on an MP3 player and loading them into the real Genie. I thought this might be more convenient than tapes. It didn't work, because the MP3 player couldn't get enough volume out the headphone socket. I could burn them to a CD-ROM like someone suggested, but I don't have a portable player so if I did this I'd still need my laptop alongside the Genie. Once I get all the programs processed I'll record the WAVs to audio tape. It's more authentic loading off real tapes anyway (-:

So, it's been an interesting exercise in going from virtual to real for an uncommon machine. Of course if someone hadn't been kind enough to include a lot of software in their emulator package, it wouldn't have happened. And if people hadn't found that archive site with the casssave prog it also wouldn't have happened!

So thanks for the support and interest.

Now, I wonder if I can do the same kind of thing for my CHALLENGER 1P??

Tezza
 
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