Did any of you notice some tape recorders were more reliable than others? I don't know if this has to do with the head alignment or something else but I found the 1010 would load some programs the XC12 just couldn't handle. Yes, of course. The best ones were the 1010 and the XC11. The XC12 AFAIK wa...

I converted two of the six commercial tape without much trouble. Two tapes were unusable. They had huge audio gaps and nothing could be done to save them. This is not necessarily a bad tape. Some commercial tapes have long gaps, it could be for copy protection and it could be for other reasons as w...

Yes, of course. I was talking about the original disk of Dimension X (which I do have). I think I also have several releases that you don't have an "original dump". I'll try to compile a list, but it might help if I could get a list of disks that you have, but didn't yet made a dump. Because from th...

Oh, glad to hear that

Forget all what I said then

Why only games are included in the archive and database? Why not include applications, tools, utilities, etc? Yeah, I know that most retro sites usually implement the same policy. But personally I don’t understand this and don’t agree. It is being said that some applications are still supported and ...

Well, it’s not exactly “nothing”, but patch is probably the wrong term. It’s actually more a trap operation. When the “patch” is enabled the emulator inserts a seudo breakpoint at SIO entry point. When the breakpoint is triggered, the emulator takes control and processes the SIO command itself. The ...

deathtrappomegranate wrote:I generally disconnect one lead from my tape deck and record in mono.

Yes, that usually should do the trick. But note that sometimes the audio data on the other channel should be preserved as well.

I don't recall if any game actually had audio. But certainly many educational titles had.

I think I have a few of the missing titles. Dimension-X for sure, but can't believe you don't have that title, not that rare. Or is the list outdated?

The tape system is IMHO, the worst part of the A8. No surprise that you have troubles and mixed results. A few notes: Some programs won't load correctly with a SIO2PC cable because the motor control signal is missing. The documentation (at least as quoted above) is wrong. You should not sample in mo...

Hi Andre,

It doesn’t actually patch the SIO code. It just doesn’t run the SIO routines. When the emulator detects a disk access is requested to SIO, it directly accesses the file image bypassing the whole SIO protocol.

I am very interesting in making images of original ST games for PC emulators... I didn't know that it was possible with protected disk. What software is necessary ? The software for running copy-protected images was already released. You can get Pasti.Dll on my site at pasti.fxatari.com. You need l...

There is no ultimate software copier. Most original disks can't be copied without extra hardware. There is imaging software though. You can image copy protected disk without custom hardware. The image can be run under emulator (both Steem and Saint). The image can be later written back to floppy, bu...