Date   : Sat, 16 Jul 2005 14:02:51 +0100
From   : Jon Ripley <jon@...>
Subject: Re: floppy discs

John Kortink wrote:
>>Technically best?  No.  Most interchangeable?  Probably.
>>Think VHS/Betamax.  Lots of people use MP3s, they use one
>>set of tools
> 
> 'One set of tools' ? There are ludicrously many, some of
> them quite buggy. There are quite enough stable and free
> tools to process WAV as well, and they are less likely to
> be buggy since they don't have to deal with compression.

There is a System One emulator http://www.cary.demon.co.uk/acorn/ that 
uses MIDI files to enocode the tape. A demonstration MIDI file is 
available on the page.

Using MIDI is an interesting concept and I wonder if it could work for 
later Acorn kit. Certainly file files would be much smaller than MP3 or WAV.

One thing that strikes me is that for any audio format, if the 
inter-block gap is reduced to the minimum acceptable length for the real 
hardware the raw audio file size can be cut down considerably.

> Not yet probably. However, for the BBC : I'm tinkering
> with the idea of supporting playback of UEF files via
> GoMMC. Although this may need a few slight adjustments
> to the OS ROM, loading a 'tape' via GoMMC may eventually
> be indistinguishable from the real, cumbersome thing
> with cassette tapes (GoMMC itself basically has no
> memory footprint, so it has the potential to 'feed'
> data to/via the actual *TAPE filing system).

Now that *is* an interesting idea.

Have fun,
Jon Ripley
-- 
http://jonripley.com/