Mike's PCjr Page

Has anyone ever used the cassette record feature on the Jr?

I had an original Radioshack system and the cassette seems to work ok, was really slow as expected..
but back then it was soooo cool....

I remember an article in Byte magazine, where the author discussed how they used 1200hz and 2400hz for 1s and 0s.

The author lambasted the designers as being typical design guys that did not have the fore thought to realize and take in to account that 2400hz was a harmonic of 1200hz and should have realized this as an issue for reliability.

It was a great read back then as I still remember the early years.

i built an S-100 computer with Bill Godbouts memory boards, Northstar Hard sectored Floppy drive...
I remember when the Color boards for the S-100 showed up on the scene and I said, "who the hell needs color for a computer", wow so young and naive.

I bought a cassette adapter for jr hoping I could use it to get some new software on it. ( I don't have a working bridge machine.)

Some of the apple ][ guys have managed this over at http://asciiexpress.net/
I've actually loaded and ran some of the lowfi tracks from the games list on my Apple //e

Haven't figured out how to convert data yet and I'm having trouble finding the tape load commands.
So if anyone has some more info, I suppose this would be the thread to dump it on.

Do you have the BASIC manual? The standard commands are LOAD and SAVE. "LOAD CAS1:" will load the next program on the tape. You can also specify the filename like "LOAD CAS1:PROGRAM.BAS". BLOAD and BSAVE can be used to write arbitrary binary data.

The other option is to use BIOS interrupt 0x15 to do the reads and writes for you. The BIOS listing for that is on page A-97 of the technical reference. It's a pretty simple interface; you can read or write 256 byte blocks.

Also be sure to read http://www.brutman.com/Cassette_Wavefor ... forms.html if you have not seen it already.

So are there no commands in DOS then?
I suppose that would have been a bit much to hope for.

But then!

Found this: http://boginjr.com/it/sw/dev/5150caxx/

Some wonderful madman has made a Cassette interface for DOS.

I don't think it's been tested on the PCjr yet, but I intend to try it out once my replacement tape-deck arrives.

That's an interesting find!

It is written as a command line utility. It would be hilarious to write a DOS block device driver and be able to give a drive letter name to a cassette deck.