Dylan’s favourite t-shirt is his Game Over shirt which always reminds me to Space Raiders from the ZX Spectrum days. I found the cassette tape quite easily but it took a significant amount of searching to find the Spectrum itself and included in the box was the tape recorder as well!
Unfortunately when I set about loading the game it didn’t work. It probably was a lot to ask after 30+ years. The audio sounded a bit low and the tape player was at maximum. I tried connecting it via an amplifier but that didn’t help.
I connected the tape drive to my Mac and looked at the file in Audacity.
Apart from being very quiet, zooming in showed that after the guard tone it was impossible to see the signal as described in this excellent post.
I tried the Fuse utilities to covert the WAV into a TZX file but these failed. I found more tools here which I installed on my Raspberry PI but the result was the same.
Eventually, I decided to see if I could find another tape player and I found an old compact media centre. I played the tape straight into Audacity just to see if I could see a difference. Clearly this find is significantly better:
I tried audio2tape but that give me a bunch of CRC errors, but processing the file with tzxwav worked perfectly:
pi@raspberrypi:~/.local/bin $ ./tzxwav -p -v -o ~/raiders.tzx -D ~/raiders.wav
=== Program: raiders ---------------------------------| 1:56
Expected length: 40
Leader: @1055530, Sync: @1275725, End: @1279885
Program: raiders (40 bytes)
--- data########----------------------------------------| 1:51
Length: 40
Leader: @1323967, Sync: @1412003, End: @1421770
40 bytes of data
=== Program: RAIDERS ---------------------------------| 1:44
Expected length: 68
Leader: @1510973, Sync: @1731454, End: @1735476
Program: RAIDERS (68 bytes)
--- data###########-------------------------------------| 1:40
Length: 68
Leader: @1778815, Sync: @1866811, End: @1882863
68 bytes of data
=== Bytes: T #----------------------------------| 1:33
Start: 16384, Expected length: 6912
Leader: @1964171, Sync: @2184510, End: @2188446
Screen: T
--- data#########################-----------------------| 1:27
Length: 6912
Leader: @2231875, Sync: @2319891, End: @3680454
6912 bytes of data
=== Bytes: C ##############---------------------| 1:16
Start: 24576, Expected length: 7860
Leader: @3778730, Sync: @3989417, End: @3993362
Bytes: C (start: 24576, 7860 bytes)
--- data###########################################-----| 0:19
Length: 7860
Leader: @4036807, Sync: @4124864, End: @6093760
7860 bytes of data
100% |##################################################| 0:00
I loaded the TZX file into Fuse and it worked as expected.
Armed with a working tape player I loaded the game on the real ZX Spectrum on the first attempt
Lastly, can we have this on our Raspberry PI? Well of course, just install Fuse and load up the TZX images:
sudo apt-get install fuse-emulator-common
sudo apt-get install spectrum-roms fuse-emulator-utils