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bootingfromcassette

Booting from cassette

Some rights reserved! Vintage technology preserved.


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Rediscovering the mysterious tape device

From the previous blogentry, let's see the IBM ROM BASIC device table again:

Name Description
KYBD: keyboard
SCRN: screen
LPT1: printer - output only, with LIST, "LPT1:"
CAS1: see more: http://github.com/retrohun/pce

As of 2018, only one non-basic application is released as an IBM PC/PCjr cassette booter, which is the IBM PC Diagnostics 1.02 (Cassette) - but some months ago, the number of such applications had been doubled - by me ( N.-).

PCE ROMBIOS Galaxian

And I am in britney-mode: "oops, I did it again" - doubled the number of tape booters - the two games mentioned in the previous post had been converted, so the can be booted from IBM ROM BASIC allegedly on a real IBM PC/PCjr having enough ram with the following commands:

LOAD "archon",r

or

LOAD "boulder1",r

for each mentioned game, respectively. The strings between the quotes are case sensitive! However, the commands themselves are not.

As a fun challenge without any reward, feel free to submit here as a change/PR/discussion poke cheats especially for boulder dash!

Listing files

Archon stuff

Boulder Dash stuff

Remarks

  • Tape files are compressed with gzip, uncompressed WAVs are 11025kHz/8bit/mono format
  • The shellscripts are dual syntax pce-ibmpc configuration files
  • Due to the custom sample rate - differs from 44100 -, these games need N's patches in pce-ibmpc
  • ROM image files not included, they must be dumped from IBM PC, not from IBM XT!

For those who want to start pce from other than a unixish host, the shell command is:

pce-ibmpc.exe -v -c pce-5150-archon.sh -g cga -R

For the other game, different configuration file should be specified, obviously.

Have fun! Hope you enjoy these games, originally met them on a C64 many decades ago.

Happy New Year!


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