The aim of the A8CAS project is to create software to read, save and archive tapes for Atari 8-bit computers.

Early Atari computers could store their programs on Compact Cassettes. Lots of commercial software was also sold on tapes. Some of the tapes employed different tricks to prevent creating illegal copies. A8CAS aims to correctly read and write all such tapes.

A8CAS is inspired by existing utilities, Ernest R. Schreurs’ WAV2CAS and CAS2WAV. Schreurs’ tools however did not support tapes with non-standard data (copy prevention mechanisms), and reading tapes from audio files was very unreliable. A8CAS addresses both of those issues. A8CAS now provides a superset of WAV2CAS’ features.

A8CAS consists of:

A shared library, liba8cas, that contains all routines needed to read and write cassettes (support for CAS, HEX, FSK and sound files WAV, OGG, FLAC etc. is implemented). The library can be used in emulators and drivers for SIO interfaces such as SIO2PC; a set of command-line tools, a8cas-tools, that contains a8cas-convert, a utility similar to WAV2CAS/CAS2WAV. The tools use the A8CAS library; a patch for the Atari800 emulator, that allows to load and save tape files (CAS, HEX, WAV, OGG, …) using liba8cas.

Changelog:

Liba8cas:

• Added the A8CAS_flush() function to API, which ends any chunk being written and writes data from buffers to disk.
• Fixed the inability to adjust stop bit length tolerance during recognition of data blocks. It was hardcoded at 0.25, now it uses the value of the A8CAS_PARAM_BLOCK_HEADER_DEVIATION parameter.
• Fixed crashes when setting A8CAS_PARAM_BLOCK_HEADER_LENGTH lower than 20.

A8cas-tools:

• Fixed a bug in a8cas-convert. When user provided an invalid value to a command-line parameter, the program silently ignored the parameter instead of warning the user

Download: A8CAS new Tools & Libs (1624)

source: a8cas.sourceforge.net