Page 1 of 1

Cataloguing a tape on the speccy

Posted: Wed Dec 21, 2016 1:21 pm
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

Re: Cataloguing a tape on the speccy

Posted: Wed Dec 21, 2016 4:13 pm
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

Re: Cataloguing a tape on the speccy

Posted: Wed Dec 21, 2016 4:14 pm
by dr beep
Or use a copy program.

Re: Cataloguing a tape on the speccy

Posted: Wed Dec 21, 2016 8:27 pm
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?