Tape format document

[srowe]

After spending ridiculous amounts of time last year learning the ins and outs of the Commodore tape format I decided to write up what I'd learned. Hopefully this is of interest to someone, any corrections please let me know.

https://eden.mose.org.uk/download/Commo ... Format.pdf

[orion70]

Simon, thanks for that! It has no practical use for me at the moment, but it's very interesting and instructive to read.

[Vic20-Ian]

Great bit of work Simon. Thank you.

[nippur72]

Great document, thanks! I've always wondered why the CBM format was so redundant compared to other formats or even turbo tape. Now I have all the answers! Also very interesting the .TAP section, I recently wrote a tap<=>wav utility that I now need to match with this new information.

[pixel]

One can reduce to first leader from $6a00 pulses to at least $2000. It's so long so that one wouldn't start recording on the non-magnetic beginning of a rewound tape. $1500 would probably also do but I didn't check. The End-Of-Tape marker is new to me. Great document! Would look great in the Denial WIKI perhaps.

[sweetlilmre]

Firstly, thank you Simon for this work, it's been very helpful.
Pixel: 1500 seems to work and is used by TapeCart. I haven't tried to drop lower than this, but if I get time I'll experiment.

I've written a PRG to TAP converter which is available at https://github.com/sweetlilmre/BinToTap if anyone is interested.

-(e)

[chysn]

I missed this a year ago, so I appreciate the necropost. Thanks, this is very educational. I appreciated the stuff about the secondary address, because the Programmers' Reference Guide doesn't explain it at all.