The Adventures Of Oswald

Help us complete the database with missing entries, dumps, ads, scans...

Moderator: Atari Frog

Post Reply
Blue Rigel
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Dec 20, 2009 7:28 am

The Adventures Of Oswald

Post by Blue Rigel » Sun Dec 20, 2009 7:45 am

I had this cassette as a kid, and I recently retrieved it from my parents' house. I wanted to get it on my PC as a CAS file, so I connected a standard tape deck to my PC to record it as a WAV file, and then I used WAV2CAS to convert it.

I tried running the program in Atari800Win Plus, and at first I was thrilled to see the title screen and hear the introductory music and sound effects... but then it stopped there.

I believe this is because at this point in the game, standard recorded audio begins playing from the cassette. The cassette has a combination of data and standard audio. When the game is playing like a story, there is recorded music and narration on the cassette that corresponds with what is going on onscreen. This audio then pauses when the game switches to an interactive segment, and then starts back up when the segment is completed.

This is all new to me, but it seems to me that this type of cassette can't be converted to a playable file by using WAV2CAS (at least not in the standard way), since the resulting CAS file would only have the data from the cassette and not the standard audio.

Is there a way to convert this type of cassette into a file that can be stored and played on a PC? I appreciate any help you can provide.
User avatar
Kr0tki
Posts: 60
Joined: Thu Sep 23, 2004 2:24 pm
Location: Warszawa, Poland

Re: The Adventures Of Oswald

Post by Kr0tki » Sun Dec 20, 2009 7:46 pm

You can save the cassette in a WAV file and then load the program directly from that file using the Altirra emulator (at the moment the only emulator that supports loading from WAV). However there is currently no way to convert this cassette to a format like CAS.

Frankly I think that's not a big problem. Such conversion would have to preserve the audio track intact, so size of the file after conversion would still be huge.

Question for the Atarimania guys: Do you have space on the server to keep such kinds of tapes as WAV files (or Vorbis or whatever)? For tapes with audio tracks it's the only way to preserve them in their original form, and there already is an emulator that would support them.
User avatar
deathtrappomegranate
Posts: 2248
Joined: Sat Jul 10, 2004 11:27 am

Re: The Adventures Of Oswald

Post by deathtrappomegranate » Mon Dec 21, 2009 12:01 am

We're thinking about this.

The are quite a few programs which use the Atari tape deck's ability to play cassette-based audio during program execution, and it would be a pity not to have them archived. The way Altirra does it is slightly cumbersome, though.
Post Reply