Date   : Fri, 04 Aug 2000 06:56:43 +0100
From   : Mike Tomlinson <mike@...>
Subject: Re: Alive again

In article <3982AA1E.B78F019C@...>, Isabel Cisternas & Robert
Schmidt <rschmidt@...> writes

>I'm sure I have one somewhere.  The collection in
>http://nvg.org/bbc/disk/watford should have at least one copy.  I know
>I've played it in BeebEm, and don't really know why a bogus one is
>online.

Right.  After a bit of fiddling, I found amongst my discs a tape copy of
Hampstead which has been transferred to disc using Vine Micro's TD ROM.
This was a tape-to-disc utility which aided in the transfer of tapes to
disc. (side note: the ROMs were serialised so that they would only
reload files using the same TD ROM originally used to copy the tape, to
prevent piracy. If a different TD ROM is used, an error message "Disc
loading error." is given.

Using pcBBC (v1.02) attempting to load a file using the TD ROM gives
"Disc loading error" even if the correct ROM is used.  BeebEm (v0.9)
does not do this - in other words, it works.

On my website I have loaded the following files:

http://jasper.org.uk/games9.ssd
http://jasper.org.uk/tdgood.rom
http://jasper.org.uk/tdbad.rom

games9 is a disc image which contains some games, including Hampstead,
transferred from tape to disc using TD ROM. tdgood.rom is the TD ROM
which will load those games, tdbad.rom is one that won't.  (I can't
remember where I got tdbad from, but it's noticeable that it's 16k
whereas tdgood is 8k)

Using tdgood, Hampstead loads and runs OK.  Might be of use to someone
wanting to hack the Hampstead tape file (V.H/STEAD) and see how it
works.

-- 
Mike Tomlinson
mike@...