[Coco] CCASM to gain .cas output feature!

[Roger Taylor]

Well what ya know!  It was an MP3 quality issue with my MP3 player 
dealing with the cassette file.  I chose a higher quality with my MP3 
encoder, and double-length sync leaders, and although it almost 
tripled the file size, this shouldn't matter at all due to the large 
capacity of most MP3 devices.

'Hello World Of Assembly' is now loading fine on my CoCo 1 from a 
cheap MP3 player.  This is a $49 RCA digital voice recorder that 
saves in MP3 format, but acts as a PC drive when you connect it using 
the USB cable.  So I converted my .cas file to .mp3, put it on the 
player and then took it over to my CoCo, connected it with a cassette 
cable I made, and I'm thrilled to see it's working!  Type CLOADM, 
then press Play on the player and in comes the file, error-free.

Now, the iPod has a volume issue which I don't understand.  Apple not 
only makes a terrible iTunes program that makes is very hard to put 
MP3 files on your iPod, but when you play them back (real songs), 
even loud ones, they sound low and soft with the volume all the way 
up.  Maybe there's a setting in there I'm missing, but if this is the 
way they do it, then thumbs down.  However, CoCo cassette files 
stored as MP3 seem to load ok from an iPod.

Now I will do the 2mhz test that I proved to work many years ago 
using my MiniDisc recorder.  That device recorded through the line-in 
from the CoCo at 2mhz onto a disc.  I think the MiniDisc format uses 
an early version of MP3.  I used to play back the double-speed 
cassette files into the CoCo, no problem, as long as the CoCo was in 
2mhz mode.  Ever done that?!  Yes, a high-speed cassette port.

If only the cassette format would allow overlayed load origins like 
LOADM does, we could CLOADM in extremely long files like cartoons 
onto the VDG screen, etc.  Maybe on an all-RAM CoCo 3, the CLOADM 
command could be patched in real-time by the CLOADM'ed program to 
allow further origins of the same file?  If it could also poke to the 
2mhz register then kick into high-speed loading of the other 
content....  Is any of this remotely interesting or am I extremely in 
need of sleep?  :-)

Sock, got any ideas?