Date   : Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:53:30 +0100
From   : francis@... (Francis Devereux)
Subject: PC to cassette to BBC

Hi,

On 18 Apr 2009, at 12:09, michael glanfield wrote:

> This has probably been asked before but I have failed to find the  
> answer ...
>
> I have a BBC and use a cassette drive to store the programs.  What I  
> would like to do is to both create the program on a PC and then  
> transfer to cassette having compiled it, or to use a program created  
> on the BBC and then transfer the file from cassette via sound card  
> to the BBC, and ideally decompile to plain text if that's the  
> correct term.  Or by RS232 as a direct link for the program from PC  
> to BBC and vice versa if that's possible.

I use TequilaComm (an unregistered version is available on the net  
somewhere, I think from http://bbc.nvg.org) on the BBC and lrzsz on a  
Linux PC to do Ymodem serial file transfers.  If you write a BASIC  
program in a text editor on the PC then you will need to *EXEC it once  
you've got it onto the BBC to tokenise it (attempting to LOAD a plain- 
text file into BASIC won't work, because LOAD only works with  
tokenised files).

An alternative program for serial transfers is Xfer, but I've never  
used it.  You can probably also use the PC's sound card connected to  
the BBC's tape interface, again I haven't done that myself but you  
could try looking at BeebEm and uef2wav.  I think that there might be  
more info on this subject on the Stairway to Hell forums (http://www.stairwaytohell.com/sthforums/

).

>  Sorry if this seems a crazy or impossible quest - I'm fairly new to  
> the BBC though OK with DOS / Linux.

No, it's pretty sane compared to a few of the things I've read about  
on this list ;-)

Francis