Loading cassettes on an emulator

[aod]

I have lots of BBC Micro software and games that I need to test out, but no reliably working physical BBC computer.

Is there a way I can use an emulator to have real physical cassette tapes loaded in to it via a tape player?

[Coeus]

Is there a way I can use an emulator to have real physical cassette tapes loaded in to it via a tape player?

I don't believe any of the current emulators will take live audio from the PC's sound card and load this as a tape. The usual method is to convert the audio into either a UEF (Universal Emulator Format) file, or a CSW (Compressed Square Wave) file. There are off-line tools to do the conversion , i.e. one would usually record the audio into a WAV file or similar using your OS's bundled sound recorder or whatever else you have, then feed the WAV file through the relevant tool.

AFAIK one such tool is called MakeUEF, which I think may be DOS-based but would probably run in a DOS window within Windows and maybe DOSBox or DOSemu on Linux. There is also UberCassette and a couple of people have been working on new tools too. One that comes to mind is, IIRC, called QuadBike. You should be able to search for all of these on here.

[vanekp]

the MAME BBC emulator will load from wav files.