Ira Goldklang's TRS-80 Revived Site » Cassette Utilities

March 25, 2008 – New Utility by Knut Roll-Lund

Ira — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 02:01:23 +0000

Knut, master of TRS-80 cassettes, has done it again with the release of his new utility, PLAY CAS. While this utility can do a lot of things, its main function is to allow you to plug your TRS-80 EAR connector into your PC Soundcard headphone output, and turn your PC into a TRS-80 cassette player. Once hooked up in this manner, the utility will play a CAS file stored on your PC into the TRS-80 plug, so your TRS-80 thinks it is getting input from a cassette, but its really from the PC.

Play CAS checks the CAS to determine whether its a Level 1, Level 2, or Model III Highspeed image.

Download and instructions are available on Knut’s PLAYCAS Web Page or on the Media Conversion page.

February 5, 2008 – New WAV2CAS

Ira — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:52:06 +0000

Knut Roll-Lund has released an updated version of his wonderful WAV2CAS utility. It is far more than a recorded WAV to .CAS file converter. You can download it here or from his Home Site.

The new version includes the following:

Windows GUI

Sound level autodetection to allow you to know if your volume setting is off

File type identification on the fly (BAS / SYSTEM)

BASIC Program Analysis/Display

July 20, 2007 – Updated Cassette Utilities from Knut Roll-Lund

Ira — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:22:34 +0000

As some of you may know, what Matthew Reed and Tim Mann did for diskettes, Knut has done for cassettes.

Knut has now refined his wonder cassette utilities and has released a major major upgrade. The new version has the following features/improvements:

Reads LEVEL 1, LEVEL 2 and MODEL III High-Speed

Reads tapes with more than one “file” and they can be any combination of the above types.

Decodes the data to verify the contents and displays the result

The LEVEL 1 and LEVEL 2 decoding is better (now it is probably better than the original)

Improved Model III High-Speed decoding, some special typical errors are handled too.

Dropout problems are almost gone, as long as there is data wav2cas can read it.

There are currently a few outstanding issues:

Will not read tapes that have very bad timing

Doesn’t like ringing so don’t record with too high volume.

Will probably have problems with system tapes output directly by EDTASM, because EDTASM inserts pauses.

You should use at least 22,050 samples per second when recording.

While it understands basic and system tapes, it does not yet understand assembly from EDTASM or Scripsit documents.

Disassembly is not yet implemented.

No documentation or help file is supplied.

You can download it here, or from Knut’s Web Site.