So you could churn your way through over 40k of data and have it fail just because the very first byte got blatted.įirebird produced a block based loader which was nice. With the Speccy all you had was a final byte(**) which (IIRC) made the total either even or odd. If one failed you knew fairly soon and could rewind. I loved the way the BBC format was stored in blocks. Would have been better with some more parity though. The old Speccy was a BREEZE to load tapes on compared to the Vic20 and the C64! At least I completed what I was working on :) So there was one guy trying to come to terms with MFM recording with signal analysers and there was me decoding Spectrum tapes. Rather amusingly at the time we were trying to develop off-spindle HDD platter reading and had an expensive analyser rig in the office. The tricky bit for us was that it turned out to be an adventure game (featuring bronze tanned boys which was where I stopped reading it) written in BASIC and I had to find a table of tokens and codes to complete the job. Pretty much just Morse Code for computers. You just need to time the interval between signal transitions and differentiate between long and short.
I already had quite a lot of knowledge of the 'format' because when I was at college I modified the ROM code to see just how fast the routines could reliably go. I worked for a data recovery company and a tape came in from a suspected kiddie fiddler. Strange to say I had to do the same thing in the 90s.
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