Had been doing some research last night on reading physical TRS-80 cassettes and saving them to disk . Had some interesting bookmarks opened, then this morning as is too often the case Firefox opened to a single tab…losing all my open tab research. This is an infuriating thing that Firefox has been randomly doing for several months now. However I had added some of these pages to my bookmarks.
Anyway one thing I found was a recommendation (see EZCap Super USB Cassette Capture) for a cassette player that works with the TRS-80. It seems that none of my old cassette players work anymore. What I really want to retrieve is a Yahtzee game I wrote back then which was particularly good because I used the TRS-80s primitive graphics to “roll” the dice. Anywho luckily for me I had added this player to one of my Amazon lists.
Here is a screen save just in case it disappears before I get it.
So you attach this player to your computer. And use something like Audacity to save a cassette recording in .wav format. Then you use software to convert the .wav file to the TRS-80 .cas format. One software recommended was trs80-tool. Some usage info here.
Of course even if I buy it there’s no guarantee that I’ll be able to successfully read a 30+ year old tape.
Speaking of Yahtzee. It seems that I’ve read in the past that other people wrote Yahtzee games also. Which makes it sound like I choose Yahtzee because everyone was doing it because it was some beginners project. Which wasn’t true in my case. The Internet was many many years away, so I didn’t read about others doing it. It was a game I enjoyed and was interested in back then. I mean board/card/dice game in general were more popular back then because it was very uncommon for the average user to play them on a computer. True it didn’t require the logic of chess but still it was a decent challenge for a young computer student. I was in school studying computers and I don’t think I was writing anything there any more challenging. Certainly Assembler was a harder language than Basic to learn. My mom liked the game too.
Just my luck that I choose a random game to program and…everyone is doing the same. I feel if I had chosen Parcheesi then I’d be venting about that now.