Spectravideo emulator for MSX1

Resident (33)

27-04-2016, 20:23

Hi! I remember I used to load a Spectravideo emulator from a tape but it couldn't load MSX programs or games and it gave me lots of errors when I gave it MSX-BASIC commands.
What was that for?

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Van NYYRIKKI

Enlighted (6095)

28-04-2016, 02:08

I think you have stumbled into Spectravideo SV-318 / 328 emulator... These were computers that were made before MSX standard was established. The SV extended BASIC is actually pretty close to MSX-BASIC, but indeed not compatible and hardware such as cassette drives, joysticks etc. are not compatible with MSX either. For more information about these computers, please look ie. here.

Van elenamancuso

Resident (33)

03-05-2016, 00:40

Then why did I have it on an MSX cassette?

Van NYYRIKKI

Enlighted (6095)

03-05-2016, 07:45

I don't know... Maybe you were not such a big fan of Sabrina or Alphaville, that you would have repurposed the cassette.

Emulators it self have their place in peoples hart even today. Today there exists also MSX emulators like openMSX and BlueMSX (This later can also emulate SVI machines)... There are also emulators for lot's of other 8-bit and 16-bit machines of 80's. The reasons for using them are yet pretty much same as back then: People don't want to put their money on real hardware and yet they want to be able to use the software made for these emulated machines. Sure the things like usability & compatibility have improved a lot from that time, but the idea is still the same.

BTW if you still happen to own that cassette, it would be nice if you could use some sound recording software to turn it in to a WAV-file (MP3 is usually not working format for storing programs) I believe I have not seen the software that we are now talking about... but I remember seeing another software that worked other way around (using MSX BASIC on SVI)

Van elenamancuso

Resident (33)

13-05-2016, 23:14

The tape was no longer working (furthermore, I don't have access to a datassette or even a cassette player now - I'd have some tapes to share), that's also why I'm asking here out of curiosity. I remember clearly it loaded from my MSX

Van NYYRIKKI

Enlighted (6095)

14-05-2016, 06:34

elenamancuso wrote:

The cassette player does not have to be MSX or SVI cassette player. Almost any normal cassette player that has audio output can be used to digitize the content. If the content is not damaged too badly, many times it can be recovered with modern audio tools & signal processing. It might not be trivial, but if you have some unique content, I'm sure you'll find some help from here.

Van elenamancuso

Resident (33)

23-05-2016, 14:32

I found a cassette player, it's not a datassette and I'm using an un-shielded jack-jack cable. I recorded the cassette input in a 22050 16bit (from another cassette to try - I can't find that one yet) then I converted it to mono and passed it with wav2cas. When I use casdir with the obtained .cas file it gives me a lot of "custom" messages. So I tried to use -e 10 switch and from blueMSX I can load part of MSX-BASIC files but not completely: The loading breaks saying "Device I/O error". Non-turbo binary files aren't read at all when I use wav2cas.
I can't use tape2cas because my cartridges slots are unusable now.
I remember I could convert like five tapes in the past with the following procedure:
Guida per convertire le cassette audio dell’MSX in immagini .DSK

Quote:

1) Record in 22050 16 bit mono, at loud volume so that the wave form takes all or almost all the width available, possibly using Cool Edit or Goldwave. In the choice of Goldwave the wave form must be signed.
2) Take the playback of the file to 11025, then resample it to 22050.
3) Once obtained the .wav file, elaborate it with MSX2Cas, the program will do everything by itself.
4) MSX2Cas will extract files from the wave form.
5) Use DSKTOOL to inject the freshly extracted giles into a .DSK image. The program will automatically create the .DSK image at the first attempt to inject a file into it.

Note: for some reasons the recording won't be recognized by MSX2Cas. In this case record the wave form onto the example file ejemplo2.wav

Now, I've lost all of the above programs due to a CD failure.
I've tried other tools like castools-1.3 or MSXCastoFiles but they don't work and I don't have the sample file

Van elenamancuso

Resident (33)

23-05-2016, 14:37

Obviously I did an internet search to find back the exact tools I used that worked good.

Van enribar

Paragon (1224)