Date   : Wed, 23 May 2001 14:04:23 +0000
From   : "W.H.Scholten" <wouter.scholten@...>
Subject: Re: Tape reading/writing

Thomas Harte wrote:
> 
> >  > The UEF format is knocking on a year old, and at least two large
> >  > repositories of UEF files exist online
> >
> >  And noone seemed interested for years before that
> 
> At that time no-one had a properly implemented Electron emulator[*]. And, in
> terms of commercial support at and near the peak of popularity, the Electron
> was primarily tape based machine, unlike the BBC with its 'money no object'
> owners and their disc drives. Why should the majority of the old Electron

Whoa there! This may be true for a small section, but tape has been the
dominant format in the 8 bit days. Perhaps after around 1987 a large
section of BBC owners may have had discs, but I doubt before that (I
only got a disc when I bought one second hand in 1995).

Another point is that the electron appeared much later than the BBC. So,
when the electron users were just beginning, many BBC users had their
machine for a year (or longer) already. No wonder those people willing
to pay the price for diskdrives, could actually afford them by then...

Still, saying most electrons were tape based I don't find a good reason
to insist on using tape images for an emulator. Discs are nicer. I'm
only interested in tapes as 'one of the media used'. 'why... have to be
tutored in how to use the ADFS' I don't find a reason either. Willing to
play the games but not willing to spend a few minutes to learn a few
disc commands?

Speaking of tape and disc: anyone here with one of those phloopy drives
:-) Do they work nicely?

> users (i.e. those without disc drives) have to be tutored in how to use the
> ADFS (or worse - the even lesser supported and horrid DFS) and how to crack
> games just to play them under emulation?

They don't. They all have undoubtedly been cracked before, just as with
all bbc games. And if you say the bbc games were cracked to put on disc,
I disagree. I cracked stuff like fortress to have a look at the code and
modify it. After that, it could easily be shared on compilation
cassettes (don't know if that sort of thing actually happened here or in
the UK; and maybe I'm wrong and I was the only tape user left in
1984/1985 ;-)

One thing that did happen btw, is that the shop where I bought my BBC
had software for sale on TDK-46 cassettes, which were commercial games
(other side usually a program from a magazine). Imagine that, shops
selling copied software (didn't know these were illegal until much
later). Not sure if these were cracked (de-locked in case of acornsoft)
or copied with 2 recorders, as I don't have these tapes anymore.

> My point is just that a good tape format was not taken up or standardised by
> the BBC mainstream, but that I required one and that 900+ images now exist

No, my comment was about the format being a year old and not being used
much by emulators nor noticed in other ways. That as I said is nothing
new...

> in it. Including some that could not be INF'd. Actually creating files that
> can't be INF'd is now trivial thanks to full UEF write support in the next
> version of ElectrEm - all it takes is some arbitrary register poking.

That's always been trivial. setting up an event loop flipping the last
block bit while saving and using the same to load a file...

Regards,

Wouter