Cataloguing a tape on the speccy

A place to discuss the ZX80's and ZX81's younger brother - the Sinclair ZX Spectrum
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Lardo Boffin
Posts: 2155
Joined: Sat Nov 26, 2016 2:42 am

Cataloguing a tape on the speccy

Post by Lardo Boffin »

Hi all

Is there a program out there that reads all the blocks on a cassette to give me some confidence that a tape is working ok?

I have a copy of Bards Tale and some of the dungeons later on in the game are loaded on demand. I don't particularly want to play through and find they don't load and it will be quite a while before my party can get there!

On my Beeb I can just type *CAT and it plays though the cassette telling you what files are present and reporting errors if the tape is dodgy.

Could I just type LOAD "" and see if the files load one after another even though they won't do anything after loading?

Thanks

Lardo
ZX80
ZX81 iss 1 (bugged ROM, kludge fix, normal, rebuilt)
TS 1000 iss 3, ZXPand AY and +, ZX8-CCB, ZX-KDLX & ChromaSCART
Tatung 81 + Wespi
TS 1500 & 2000
Spectrum 16k (iss 1 s/n 862)
Spectrum 48ks plus a DIVMMC future and SPECTRA
dr beep
Posts: 2059
Joined: Thu Jun 16, 2011 8:35 am
Location: Boxmeer

Re: Cataloguing a tape on the speccy

Post by dr beep »

Not too hard to make such a program.
All you need is a copy of the loader where you skip the actual writing to memory.
At the end a checkbyte is read from tape which is calculated. The legendary checkbyte from
R : Tape Loading error
dr beep
Posts: 2059
Joined: Thu Jun 16, 2011 8:35 am
Location: Boxmeer

Re: Cataloguing a tape on the speccy

Post by dr beep »

Or use a copy program.
Lardo Boffin
Posts: 2155
Joined: Sat Nov 26, 2016 2:42 am

Re: Cataloguing a tape on the speccy

Post by Lardo Boffin »

Thanks. Would the tape load tester on the 128 work for this? I assume once the volume was correct it would continue to say it was ok and report an error if there was problem with the tape?
ZX80
ZX81 iss 1 (bugged ROM, kludge fix, normal, rebuilt)
TS 1000 iss 3, ZXPand AY and +, ZX8-CCB, ZX-KDLX & ChromaSCART
Tatung 81 + Wespi
TS 1500 & 2000
Spectrum 16k (iss 1 s/n 862)
Spectrum 48ks plus a DIVMMC future and SPECTRA
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