fuzzel's personal BBC Micro cassette tape archive

[fuzzel]

Following on from the disc archive that lurkio has kindly been working on for me, I've begun work on archiving my tape collection using the wonderful Quad Bike v2 utility by Diminished. I haven't decided yet how I'll archive each tape - because of the poor condition of most of them I've had to do several passes creating a number of different uef files in order to recover as many files as possible. I'm currently saving each tape side on a separate disc so I'll probably post these instead and maybe later on I'll recreate the uef tapes. What I've found so far is a version of my Middle Kingdom 3 adventure which has a copy-protection feature where the filename changes with each block (sadly this file is not completely recoverable yet), a new adventure game called Adventure Sato written by Tom Sato and an incomplete game written in Basic called Robots. I've searched the BBC Micro Games Archive for this game but have drawn a blank. I've managed to load the blocks I have recovered so far by creating a dummy empty file with the same filename and by toggling the loading between the two I've managed to load the recoverable blocks 0D, 0E, 0F, 13, 16 and 18 (final block).
I've attached a Beebem save state, does anyone know what this game is? I will of course persevere and try to recover some more blocks, ideally the all-important first one which could reveal who wrote it.

robotsloadedblocksmissing2.uef

(145.56 KiB) Downloaded 24 times

[fuzzel]

I'm struggling to recover this Robots game so I'm making the WAV recordings I've done available on Google Drive.

1. CASS3BS.WAV - this is the full stereo recording of side B of cassette 3 with ROBOTS on. Link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KYcG92 ... share_link
2. CASS3BS2.WAV - this is a partial stereo re-recording of side B of cassette 3 with ROBOTS on. Link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kYpOAI ... share_link
3. CASS3BM1.WAV - this is the mono recording of side B of cassette 3 with ROBOTS on. Link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wD6fHl ... share_link
4. CASS3BM2.WAV - this is a mono re-recording of side B of cassette 3 with ROBOTS on. Link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-elZax ... share_link

Also below is a stereo recording of side A, again I've had no luck recovering any files from it. Link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jbk0J2 ... share_link

[fuzzel]

Here's a copy of the makeuef log of the file where I managed to recover a few blocks of the Robots file (see first post):

cass3bsr.log

(2.73 KiB) Downloaded 17 times

The Quadbike command I used to create the csw file is as follows:
quadbike-avx2 --scale-hf-pwr 2.5 -c R -o cass3bsr.csw CASS3BS.WAV
Power set to 2.2 - 2.5 seems to produce the best results.

[vanekp]

these recording really don't sound good at all, I am surprised you are getting anything out of them they are very low in volume and sound very muffled like the tape azimuth is not correct and/or the pressure pad at the back of the tape is perished and not doing its job to press the tape against the play head, even the audio wave files do not look good, there should no be such a big difference between the low and high tone frequencies.
the wave should look like this to have any sort of chance to extract anything out of it.

This is the kind of signal you will get if the pressure PAD is not doing its job.

[lovebug]

it might be worth trying to replace the pressure pad or even remove the tape spools and place into a known good cassette

[iamaran]

I've attached a Beebem save state, does anyone know what this game is? I will of course persevere and try to recover some more blocks, ideally the all-important first one which could reveal who wrote it.

robotsloadedblocksmissing2.uef

I think it's Robot Attack by Edward Hung. Beebug Magazine volume 2 number 3.

[fuzzel]

I've come across another game from my tape collection that I can't find in the archive. It's called Dodgems and it follows the usual script where there are a few blocks missing, this time at the start. I've recovered it by using Toolkit's *RECOVER and it would appear that all I've missed are the instructions at the start of the program (line 440 at the beginning looks like a request to press space before the game proper runs). The disc is attached and the program to load is DODGEM3. I tried to get it to run by deleting lines 440, 460, 470 and 480 and inserted a DIM d%(3),e%(3) at a new line 445 but I get a no room error, even loading it at &E00. Looking at line 800 it looks like one of the Welcome tape games but I couldn't find it on the BBC version and I can't find the Electron one anywhere.

DODGEMS.ssd

(20 KiB) Downloaded 20 times

[fuzzel]

It looks like the game is Dodgems by BBC Soft or Acornsoft, probably the version in Arcade Action. I figured that the "No room" message was due to K% not being set (it would have been set in one of the missing early lines). When K% is set to &5500 before running the game the screen is displayed thus:

I then found the screen by searching for Dodgems at The Complete BBC Micro Games Archive.

[fuzzel]

My next headscratcher is another partial file with a number of room descriptions but I can't figure out which adventure it is. There's a yellow brick road, a rainbow room, a room decorated like a maharajah's palace, an alchemist's laboratory, a music room, a petrified forest and some everglades (this one rings a bell). Anyone remember which game these appear in? I've attached a disc containing the file.

DISASSEM.ssd

(15 KiB) Downloaded 10 times

If only the CASA solutions website was searchable I could look for nouns and verbs but the solutions are separate text files so presumably don't appear in google searches.

[iamaran]

My next headscratcher is another partial file with a number of room descriptions but I can't figure out which adventure it is. There's a yellow brick road, a rainbow room, a room decorated like a maharajah's palace, an alchemist's laboratory, a music room, a petrified forest and some everglades (this one rings a bell). Anyone remember which game these appear in? I've attached a disc containing the file.

That's Sphinx Adventure.

[fuzzel]

My next headscratcher is another partial file with a number of room descriptions but I can't figure out which adventure it is. There's a yellow brick road, a rainbow room, a room decorated like a maharajah's palace, an alchemist's laboratory, a music room, a petrified forest and some everglades (this one rings a bell). Anyone remember which game these appear in? I've attached a disc containing the file.

That's Sphinx Adventure.

Thanks, a game that I haven't played since bitd, but definitely on my to-do-list (not high up though). I'm somewhat put off by games like Philosopher's Quest which are extremely tight (the solution requires close to the minimum number of moves possible to solve the game) and for some reason I have Sphinx in that category.