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Exidy Sorcerer II Questions

tempest said:
Ok I'll have to check that tapetool2 program out. Looks like that may be the only way to do this.
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It certainly seems to convert .com files from disk to reliable Sorcerer WAV files, given the right parameters. This has been my experience. I was given the parameters though rather than figure it out myself, so I'm no expert in using the tool.

Tez
 
So we need the parameters for converting .wav to .bin then. I wonder if it matters if it's a 1200 or 300 baud wav file? I would assume so, but I'm not an expert on this stuff.
 
If you mean MESS/MAME style .bin then it can't do that yet due to lack of documentation on this proprietary 'quickload' format.
This why I asked earlier in the thread for some input from people who had reverse engineered it.
Currently it supports a straight binary with no header info or checksum which is great for analysis and disassembly but less useful for your purposes.
Hopefully there will be an update soon and once that has happened and I've tested it I'll let you know how to use it to create files for your high speed interface.
 
Since we already know how the header works (Claus looked into it), could we make one and appended to the beginning of the file somehow?
 
Hello, I am the creator of the BIN format.

Here's the information that I gave to Exidyboy just a few minutes ago.

The first 7 bytes are the QBASIC header, which are swallowed up by QBASIC. However MAME has to skip them instead.
Offset - Meaning
0 - QBASIC flag (always FD)
1,2 - QBASIC load segment (always 00 80)
3,4 - QBASIC load address (always 00 00)
5,6 - QBASIC file size (this is the size from doing a DIR of the file - 7)
7 on - Information area, such as filename and notes of interest (zero bytes are skipped; terminated with a 1A byte).
next 2 - Start address (for autorun)
next 2 - Load address
next 2 - End address
next to the end - the program (no checksums)

All 16-bit numbers are in little-endian (small byte then big byte).

It's allowable for the end address to be less than the start address - the program will wrap around in memory. Needed for "Orb of Halucidon".

Hopefully this will help you guys out. :)
 
tempest said:
Since we already know how the header works (Claus looked into it), could we make one and appended to the beginning of the file somehow?
Click to expand...

Yes that is possible but I will be testing .wav to MESS/MAME style .bin conversion over the weekend in a beta version I've been sent by the author so perhaps wait a few days before you go down that path.
 
tempest said:
Does anyone have an easy to use WAV to BIN file converter? The one I have is a 32-bit DOS program which no longer works in Windows 10.
Click to expand...

TapeTools2 https://www.toptensoftware.com/tapetool/ has been updated to converter Sorcerer .wav files to MAME's .bin format.

Syntax is:

Code: 
tapetool2 --sorcerer luna.wav parseAudio --baud:1200 blocksToMame luna.mame.bin
 
What does the tapetool do if it encounters a CRC error?

The download page doesn't seem to mention the creation of .BIN files.

I seem to be hobbled by having my posts moderated, so hopefully this will appear in a timely fashion.
 
I tried running the tapetool in Ubuntu using mono like they suggested but it threw errors. Not sure what's going on, I'm going to have to try in Windows I guess.
 
Tried the tool today. It makes .bin files, but they don't seem to work right with Claus's menu system. Not sure if it's the file or the device though.
 
Ok looks like the two games I selected were somehow formerly CP/M games. So Claus changed the extension to .COM and they seemed to work.
 
Tape wav to bin utility

Tape wav to bin utility

Hi, this is Rob, I'm new to this board - see my intro on the Introductions thread. I've recently fired up my Sorcerer 1, which my Dad brought home in 1979 when I was 15 years old. It's probably the first time it's run in 35 years or more.

Hope it's ok to bump this old thread which I found very useful and interesting.

I downloaded Tezza's software trove and inevitably found it quite tricky to load software via the tape interface. Still, necessity is the mother of invention and I figured it would be good to devise a digital interface. I saw ClausB's amazing Teensy-based tape simulator and thought it would be useful to have a means to take Tezza's WAV files and render them into a binary format. NB I'm new to this, so I realise I am reinventing wheels, and also the irony of converting WAV to BIN, when many of Tezza's WAV files were sourced from an emulator and converted BIN to WAV.

Nonetheless, in hope it might be useful to someone I've just upload to Github the Python file converter I have written. It's very lightly tested, but nonetheless it works on a lot of Tezza's WAV files. Even if no-one runs it, since it's open source, perhaps it's a useful illustration of the tape format.

Hope it's of some interest.
https://github.com/robjordan/cassette
 
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