Sharp MZ and tape adapter
October 31st, 2011
On 8-bit ‘puters we often face the problem of transferring files to and from modern day machines. I had already hacked together MZduino, which is comfortably fast, but might not be for everyone. On Sharp MZ (and several other retro computers) you also have the option of playing back files as audio to the cassette port. Here’s another option from DealExtreme: Cassette adapter. That ridiculously low price includes shipping, so money should be no issue. After this all you need to do is to convert your mzf files into wavs and play them back through your sound card using your favorite piece of software. I used J.F.J Laros’ mzf2wav together with Audacity. You might need to crank the volume rather high, disable all audio filtering and experiment a bit with mzf2wav’s parameters. I needed to use the -c option. If the tape drive seems to have a hard time rotating the cassette, open the thing and throw away the cogs — they’re not used for anything in this case anyway.
By tweaking mzf2wav’s parameters you might be able to reduce the loading times considerably, but I didn’t have much luck with them so far.
Kommentin kirjoitus
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