Tap Dancer Project

I have setup some make rules for automagically creating DMG (mountable disk images) for the associated tapdancer binaries.

They are available for download at http://sourceforge.net/projects/tapdancer.

Remember this is pre-alpha, or at least that is what I’m calling it right now.

It will however convert a c64 TAP file (.tap extension) into a Sun AU audio file that can be either recorded to a blank tape, or burnt to a CD. (We generally use a car cassette CD adaptor to feed it from CD into the real datasette, although I have started to experiment with recording the audio out to tape.)

I will post some instructions on how to do this at a later stage, but for simple usage of tapdancer: –

1. Download the dmg, and copy the files to a location that is executable in the path (for example /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin).

2. Find a suitable TAP file (the are plenty of places you can obtain them from).

3. In terminal, type: tapdancer mygame.tap

This will produce an audio file, called “mygame.au”, which is the audio as the datasette would read it. Playing it back loudly in your ears is not advisable hehe, but it sounds a lot like a 300 baud modem… which interestingly enough is a pretty good analogy for how the datasette worked. If you plan to load the software onto a real commodore, I’d advise using a program that will play back audio without special effects or EQ settings (avoid Quicktime and iTunes like the plague).

The best option is to use a CD burning program and burn them onto a CD, and use a cassette adaptor to feed the audio into the datasette.

You could try using an mp3 player, but in practice I have found depending on the player and the encoder you will likely experience a lot of trouble.

Either way, it will take some fiddling with volume to find the optimal level for this to work. You also need to ensure the heads on your datasette are properly aligned as well.

Windows binaries will follow, when I get time to fire up my Windows machine and perform the necessary builds.

April.