[Coco] CocoTape

[Roger Taylor]

At 07:44 PM 1/11/2009, you wrote:


>OK, I may have worded the report badly. I did expect to test 
>transferring a file from a PC to a Coco. Instead of the chosen file, 
>I got the file name COCO3.COM and the "by golly" message.

Ah.  Well, the filename, not being important for the purpose of 
CoCoTape, had to be set to something.

Alan Jones had a glitch at first trying to transfer an ASCII BASIC 
listing but it turned out he was omitting the "-" character in 
-csavea.  Now it works.
You just happen to go right for the only goofed routine I know of 
that I somehow (and I apologize) forgot to remove the test routines 
from.  You've yet to report any part of the program that's actually 
working.  I do appreciate the bug reports and the negative feedback 
because it lets me know what I need to do, but I was hoping by now to 
hear someone say that they transferred a file ok and was either 
amazi-fied, or not.  :)


>That much worked but it does not constitute a complete test of a 
>file transfer from my point of view. Are you saying I should run a 
>test with a contiguous file because that would transfer, or would I 
>just get the "by golly" message?

The test message is only in the MakeGappedBinary() routine which is 
separate from the MakeContiguousBinary() routine.  There shouldn't be 
any other mode that sends a By Golly message to the CoCo's VDG screen.

I've loaded probably 60 games into my CoCo 2 already using CoCoTape, 
and played them.  I've typed many sample BASIC listings using Rainbow 
or notepad, and CLOAD'ed those and they ran.  The CoCo (stuck back in 
the early 80's) thinks it's a real tape file, only it's almost pure 
digital so there's little chance you'll see the ?IO ERROR from a poor 
signal unless your CoCo cable is shot or the PC sound is adjusted 
terrible.  I even added extra delay between gaps to allow the CoCo to 
choke on incoming ASCII BASIC lines that take the tokenizer a bit of 
time to compress.  No motor control is possible so hopefully this 
will work 100% of the time.

I'll get 1.1 done shortly, and thanks for the reports.

-- 
Roger Taylor

http://www.wordofthedayonline.com