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Re: Obit - Sir Clive Sinclair, Computing Pioneer [message #411170 is a reply to message #411167] Thu, 23 September 2021 11:45 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
Anonymous
Karma:
Originally posted by: Rich

In comp.os.linux.misc Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Carlos E. R. <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
>> On 22/09/2021 21.57, Andreas Kohlbach wrote:
>>> On Wed, 22 Sep 2021 09:13:12 +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
>>>> Might not work (a capture). Just a guess. If you do try, make
>>>> sure to not use mp3. Now that I think, I would try the
>>>> experiment, to find out.
>>>
>>> There was a short lived [1] UK computer show "4 Computer Buffs"
>>> <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1178499/> I never heard of before.
>>> They sent program data via audio the audience record. When I found
>>> the show on Youtube I tested that (extracted the audio at that
>>> position) and ran the resulting WAV in an emulator fir that
>>> particular machine on my PC. It my amazement it worked.
>>
>>
>> Wow.
>
> Systems that saved programs on cassette used an audio format. Due to
> the sloppiness of the media, I think the recording format had to be
> pretty robust.

At least in the case of the Atari 400/800 cassette format it was a very
simple format:

Format details are here: https://www.atariarchives.org/dere/chaptC.php

132 byte records, two start bytes for 'speed detection', a control
byte, 128 data bytes, and a single checksum byte (and the checksum is
just a simple endaround carry sum of the 131 other bytes in the record).

The physical byte encoding on the tape was frequency shift keying, with
5327 Hz for a mark and 3995 Hz for a space.

So it at least it had a simple checksum, but the packet format was
hardly "robust". Workable, but memory of those days was that the
cassette was quite flakey as a data storage format, sometimes it
worked, sometimes it did not. And when it did not rereading things all
over again sometimes magically had them work.

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