[Coco] cocotape.exe progress

[Roger Taylor]

Guys, when I'm done with this command, there'll be no need for a 
casout.exe or .cas converter for CLOADing stuff into your CoCo from a 
PC.  It's obviouslty not a disk drive replacement but it serves its 
purpose for sure.  Sometimes an emulator just doesn't cut it, and 
there's a lot of CoCo users out there without a disk drive who want 
to fire some old games up that are only available to them from their PC.

I just finished the single-segment ML converter that takes a 
PC-stored .bin file and creates the CoCo tape audio stream.  This 
involved peeking at the start and end headers (5 bytes each) and 
putting that info in the tape's filename header block.  The rest of 
the file is one huge block that gets split into 255-byte blocks for 
the tape file.

Still to come, the multi-segment .bin files (usually ones that 
auto-EXEC or load into different places in RAM).  I'll have to 
examine these .bin files to detect what kind they are to keep from 
having to use command-line switches all the time to force gapped or 
contiguous files for the CoCo.  Probably just counting the # of 
blocks will do.  3 blocks (start/seg/end) should be a single-segment 
file and >3 should be multi-segment (start/seg1/seg2/end).  We'll see 
how it goes.

Also done are ASCII and tokenized BASIC programs.  Again, the PC file 
already has to be in tokenized format for that to work.  ASCII BASIC 
can be an original CoCo ASCII file or a text-edited file, like from an IDE.  :)

I just CLOADM'ed bandito.bin, bandit.bin, and wof.bin (flight sim) 
which were single-segment files and they worked perfect.  Tons of 
.bin files are on my archive DVD and can also be extracted from 
hundreds of .dsk files using wimgtool.exe and other .dsk managers.


-- 
Roger Taylor

http://www.wordofthedayonline.com