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Commodore tapes…

without comments

Last weekend, I spent some time to understand why C16 tape emulation was not completely working in MESS.

Since Commodore tape fixes were my first serious contributions to MESS and since C64, C128 and Vic20 tapes were already perfectly working, I had been a bit disappointed when my attempt to fix C16 never produced any result.

I mean, launching C16 in MESS, you were able to load games from cassettes and to play these games. But for some reason the motor was not correctly turned off.
Similarly, recording BASIC programs on tape was not working: the cassette drive was going on and on even after the BASIC routine had printed on screen that saving was finished.

It took me half an hour to spot the mistake in the previous implementation. As a result:

after saving a program….
save01save02

…you can reload it…
load01load02

…and it runs (thinking back, it could have been funnier to make the program write “Hora” 😉 )!
run

Not very exciting, you will probably think. But I’m really satisfied to have moved MESS one step closer to perfect tape emulation for Commodore drivers!

No luck with PET cassettes, unfortunately. Those still remain in my TODO list and might be fixed sometimes in the future…

In the meanwhile, a lot of skeleton drivers have been included in MESS and Curt Coder has done astounding progresses on my barely sketched Kyocera driver. You can now fully enjoy Olivetti M10, Tandy TRS Model 100, NEC PC8201A and Tandy Model 200 (and even some of their successors), by compiling the current svn source! Or you can wait for MESS 0.132…

Written by etabeta

May 21st, 2009 at 3:39 pm

Posted in MESS

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