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TRS-80 Information: Transferring TRS-80 Tapes To Your PC

by Ira @ 10:28 pm on March 1, 2009.

Transferring TRS-80 Tapes To Your PC

Step-By-Step Instructions on How to Do Tape Transfers To Your PC

Make sure your volume is set right. This is Radio Shack’s recommended volume chart (chart thanks to Neil Morrison):

Recorder Model	User-Generated Tapes			Pre-Recorded Radio Shack Tapes
	Model I		Model III	Model I		Model III
	Level I	Level II		Level I	Level II
CTR-40	Yellow Line	Red Line		Yellow Line	Red Line
CTR-41	6 – 8	4 – 6		6.5 – 8.5	5 – 7
CTR-80	4.5 – 6.5	3 – 5	5 – 7	5.5 – 7.5	2.5 – 5	4 – 6
CTR-80A	4.5 – 6.5	3 – 5	5 – 7	5.5 – 7.5	2.5 – 5	4 – 6
CTR-81	4.5 – 6.5	3 – 6	5 – 7	5.5 – 7.5	2.5 – 5	4 – 6

With regard to the volume, first listen to the tape and see if it sounds right. If you have a treble control, you probably want maximum treble. Once it sounds good, then you can move on to trying to read it.


2.	Install a Sound Capture Program such as Goldwave.

3a.	Hook up a patch cable. Put one end in your the earphones jack on the tape recorder …

3b.	… and one end in your sound card’s line-in jack. Make sure to specify the input line (microphone or line in) on your recording software.

4.	Start Goldwave.

5.	Go to FILE -> NEW and set the settings to: Channels: MONO Sampling Rate: 11,025 Duration: 16 Minutes

6.	Insert the cassette in your cassette recorder. Press the RECORD button on the pop-up window Then press PLAY on the cassette recorder.

7.	(This is not a step – this is just what a CLOAD Magazine tape looks like as it records). The volume setting of CLOAD cassettes is volume 5 on a CTR-80.

8.	When done, presss the STOP button on the pop-up window, and the STOP button on the cassette recorder.

9.	Drag the Light Blue bars from the left, and from the right, side of the screens, to surround each sound bar recording. Leave a little spare space before and after.

10.	Choose FILE -> SAVE SELECTION AS, and give it a name. Click OK. File Name: (see below) Save as Type: WAVE (*.WAV) Attributes: PCM Unsigned, 8 bit, mono In this example, I saved it as “FILE1″ (no quotes) because its the first of many files.

11.	In a DOS window where you saved the file from STEP 10, run WAV2CAS on the file you just saved. For my example, I typed “WAV2CAS FILE1″ (no quotes) on the DOS Command Line, since I had called it “FILE1″ (no quotes) in the above step. Click OK on the window which pops up. A CAS file has now been created.

12.	(This is not a step, just an illustration of the file sizes of the first program).

13.	Run your TRS-80 emulator. For my purposes, I am converting the cassettes to files, so I booted up into NEWDOS/80, and went into BASIC. The screen you see here is the INSERT CASSETTE dialog box of Matthew Read’s Windows TRS-80 emulator. The CAS and WAV files are both selectable. We will be selecting CAS files only.

14.	As you can see, I have executed the CMD”T” command to turn off the real time clock on the TRS-80. Cassette operations are interrupted unless you do this. I then entered the CLOAD command to commence loading of the cassette image. You can see it is loading, by the “” in the corner. If you are not getting “” and “” alternatively at a decent pace, your image is no good. Possible solutions for the NO BLINK situation are to fix your volume level, or to make sure you are not CLOADing a SYSTEM tape.

15.	LIST your program to make sure it looks ok.

16.	Although you should probably SAVE your file to virtual disk first, in case it is a self modifying program, what you see here is the converted tape RUNning.

17.	Go back to Step 9, above, and move the light blue bars before and after the next set of bars. Repeat all steps until done.