[Coco] Xroar and tape emulation

[Ciaran Anscomb]

Allen Huffman wrote:
> On Apr 2, 2013, at 3:00 PM, Ciaran Anscomb <cocomalt at 6809.org.uk> wrote:
> > Hmm, yes, XRoar's approach isn't very good for that case (though it's
> > alright for the "load a program off one tape, same data out to another"
> > case).
> >
> > I'll stick it on the list to consider a better interface for this sort
> > of thing.
> 
> At the very least, a way to flush the tape to disk without having to exit 
> the program or load another tape file... Maybe there is a way?

Huh, seems only the Gtk+ interface has a way to eject a tape without
inserting another one!  Bit of an oversight...

> I have not used Xroar enough to know how the cassette emulation works 
> yet, but in real life, we had to swap out cassette tapes if we wanted to 
> write to a different one, and make a note of the counter if we were going 
> to fast forward to a program to load it quicker.

For audio files, reading and writing at arbitrary points in the same
file would be straightforward.  Unadorned CAS files could work, though
due to the different duration of a 0 and 1 bit, you might get some
strange effects.  I think any leader padding might confuse things, so
that might need to be disabled for shared in/out files.  And of course
it wouldn't make sense to support writing to an ASCII BASIC (".asc") file.

I'll think about it, and hopefully have something (even if it's just
"eject" as a keyboard shortcut) for the next release.

..ciaran