Tap Packer

[Cgonzalez]

Hi,

I've created a simple tool to create Pack of games on a big tap file with a Basic Menu,

So you can have a pack a lot of games on a single TAP file with a simple basic menu to select the desired game, for your pleasure on your divmmc, zxuno, etc.

• First install python3 on your computer,
  Clone the repo https://github.com/cmgonzalez/packer (or download as ZIP)
  Copy all your taps on a folder of your computer, rename the taps as you desire to have on the menu.
  Run the packer.py python script
  Enjoy!

For example,
python3 packer.py packs/ZXDEV17/ zxdev17.tap "ZX-DEV 2017 CONVERSIONS" zxdev17 0 3 0 3 7 2 7

The params are the following:
[path]: Path of the source taps files, it will pick *.tap.
[tap]: Output tap filename.
[title]: Title of the menu
[program]: Basic Program name of the Loader
[paper]: Paper of menu
[ink]: Ink of the menu
[border]:Border of the menu
[sel_paper]:Selected item paper
[sel_ink]:Selected item ink
[title_paper]:Menu title paper
[title_ink]:Menu title ink


Cautions
Taps with bleepload that have zillions of tap blocks, they will make the search of the selected program slower.
Also program names should be different for each tap file. u can use zx-blockeditor to rename them.(Maybe on a future revision I will auto rename taps)

I've created some taps with the ZX-DEV games as example, you can download them:
zx-dev 15
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1lZwjU ... WxZU4AEOWn

zx-dev 17
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1YX7qT ... oMNeGeVewq

zx-dev 18
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1gdUAv ... dwP_9HOBRa

[Dr beep]

In DOS :
COPY /B A.TAP + B.TAP C.TAP
Adds a.tap and b.tap after eachother in c.tap

[Cgonzalez]

In DOS :
COPY /B A.TAP + B.TAP C.TAP
Adds a.tap and b.tap after eachother in c.tap

Yes, but this have a basic menu to select which tap to load...

[akeley]

Whoa, this looks fabulous! Very handy! I can imagine making loads of tap packs with various themes this way, can reduce clutter on my DIV.

Are there any limitations on amount of .taps or file size?

[Cgonzalez]

Whoa, this looks fabulous! Very handy! I can imagine making loads of tap packs with various themes this way, can reduce clutter on my DIV.

Are there any limitations on amount of .taps or file size?

The limits will be basic Memory only.

I've tested with a mix of 64 taps and 3.7MB size, on a personal M.A.M.E. build, loading time is a little slow as you reach the end of the list. Because the speccy will have to search one by one, to find the correct TAP to load, but it's just a few secs on my omni n divmmc devices.

Warning Emulators sometimes crash when using this bigs files, but on real hardware they work just great. ZX Spin seems to be only one that like them!.

[Spezzi63]

Hi,
I find the tool you developed very useful !
Please keep going
Does this tool only work with python3 and not with higher versions of Python ?
Is there a small window planned for entering the parameters ?
many Greetings

[PeterJ]

Interesting tool [mention]Cgonzalez[/mention]

Thank you.

[PeterJ]

Does this tool only work with python3 and not with higher versions of Python ?

Any release of the 3 series (which is the latest) will be fine. I'm on the latest release which is Python 3.8.3

[Cgonzalez]

Hi,
I find the tool you developed very useful !
Please keep going
Does this tool only work with python3 and not with higher versions of Python ?
Is there a small window planned for entering the parameters ?
many Greetings

What do u mean by a small window? some kind interactive questions?

[Spezzi63]

A small GUI for the parameters