How do I use my old tapes in Winape?

[Clement Saggers]

Hi there, this is my first post here, and I have the Winape 32 CPC Emulator, and I would like to use my old tapes in it, because I have a lot of programs and games I made a long time ago on them, and I would like to load them into my emulator and save them to the computer before the tapes become completly unreadable, but I don't quite know how to use the "tape controll" feature.  I thought I would be able to connect a cassette recorder to my computer, then load the tapes with the "tape control" thing, but I cant find an option to do it. So how do I do it?

[Gryzor]

Hello Clement,

First of all, welcome to the forum. Please do register as a normal user, because if you post as a Guest your posts will have to wait for approval in order to be shown... This is necessary to prevent spamming.

Now, on the issue of tapes, Winape does not control your tape recorder. The Tape Control feature is there to enable it to load tape images (cdt) that have already been transfered. So, you must use another procedure to transfer your tapes.

Alas, got to go and I don't have time to describe how (though I'm sure others will beat me to it), but do look around for cdt2wav and wav2cdt.

Cheers
Gryzor

[mr_lou]

If you don't have the necessary knowhow or tools to transfer your tapes, then I'm sure you will be able to find someone here on the forum who can help you.
Where do you live? You could send the tapes to someone in the same country (or a copy of them to make sure they won't get lost).
Otherwise, if you want to do it yourself, start looking in the Wiki for ways to transfer.  You'd probably look into recording the tapes to wav files which should then be converted into cdt files. I've never had much luck with this myself though.

[arnoldemu]

Hi there, this is my first post here, and I have the Winape 32 CPC Emulator, and I would like to use my old tapes in it, because I have a lot of programs and games I made a long time ago on them, and I would like to load them into my emulator and save them to the computer before the tapes become completly unreadable, but I don't quite know how to use the "tape controll" feature.  I thought I would be able to connect a cassette recorder to my computer, then load the tapes with the "tape control" thing, but I cant find an option to do it. So how do I do it?

The first step is to record them as a wave (.wav) audio file from the cassette.

The way I do it is to connect a tape recorder to the line input of my sound card and then use a program like Goldwave to record the sound. You do this without the emulator.

When you're done you'll have a wav of one side of a cassette (so estimate the size of the wav you need if you're using Goldwave. e.g. 10 mins).

One thing to note when recording is to turn off dolby and put all equalizer values to 0, these alter the sound from the cassette - you need to record the sound without extra effects.

You will also need to increase the volume a bit, but not too much otherwise the wav will be too quiet and the emulator will not hear it.

You can use the Goldwave preview to see if the wave is getting too loud (the waveform needs to be tall but not too much that it goes over the top and bottom of the view).

When you have recorded to wav you can convert to cdt later.

Some emulators support wav files directly and will load from them.

www.cpctech.org.uk look in the documents and find the ones relating to tapes. these will tell you how to record cassettes to be used with emulators.