Paletape Information

PALETAPE

A Lynx tape reader program

Ver 1.0
Date: 15 June 2003
Author: Pete Todd

Lynx Tape Format

• Sync - Zeroes for about 7 seconds
• A5 byte
• " byte
• <filename>
• " byte
• Sync - Zeroes for about 7 seconds
• A5 byte
• Program Header - length, start etc.
• Program
• CRC & Execution address

Tape Recording

Paletape expects sound files saved in .RAW format
as recordings at 22050 Hz and 8 bits UNSIGNED.

Record the lynx tape using your favourite program,
you can chop out the sync zeroes as the program
automatically re-syncs itself, leaving them in
won't harm though (as long as there's no glitches!)

Needless to say, you want to check your system
records with low noise, and adjust the recording
level to around 80% of full range on the peaks.

PaleTape usage

paletape <RAW infile> <TAP outfile> <verbose (0/1)> <threshold (00-FF)> <TAPE Speed (0-5)> <Tape format (0-2)>
 [ <sync marker - A5 default> ]

for example: paletape pblaster.raw pblaster.tap 0 7b 0 0

retrieves the power blaster MLOAD program, use tape format 0 for most
normal basic or machine code binary programs.

Formats:

0 - Standard Lynx format for BASIC and MLOAD'ed Binaries
1 - Same as above, but where the name is missing
2 - The data format used by Level 9 - basically as type 1 but with different header info

Basically you are looking for an A5 byte as the first byte read off the tape

You can see an example of the correct A5 byte (for a TAPE 0 recording) in
the image below.

This should also give you an idea of the sort of sound file we're looking for here, the ones are the wide pulses, this program times the width of these vs the zeroes. The time measured is from
where the signal drops below the threshold until the time it rises again.

Known Issues

1. Only TAPE speeds 0 and 5 are tested - I have no files to check the timings with for the others.