SOL 20 Cassette Tape General Question

[ihearta380]

Hi I have my Sol 20 working and I have sent a few games over to it via serial just using the serial terminal. I have a cassette player that I have hooked up however I am unfamiliar on how to get the data onto the cassette to read from. Is there a specific program to convert the HEX or ENT files to the required audio tones?
Thank you for any advice given.

 

[Hugo Holden]

The Sol-20 operating system Solos, allows you to save and retrieve programs that are in the SOL's memory to and from tape. It creates the recorded tones. If you want to make a recording of some program, you can send it to the SOL as an ENT file (via the serial port) and then save it to tape. The details are in the SOL's manual.

I wrote an article once that helps explain how their tape recording and playback system in the SOL works, it was very well done:

https://www.worldphaco.com/uploads/The_SOL-20_tape.pdf

PT's system was good in that it compensated for wow & flutter and speed drift seen in small cheap cassette recorders. Most of these use a motor with a simple inertial mechanical switch speed govenor. If you record a 1kHz tone and play it back, it is easy to hear the regular speed variations caused by the motor being switched on & off. Some of the bigger/better cassette tape decks had electronic speed controllers and didn't suffer from that issue.