Cheetah SpecDrum: A Wish For a Little Supporting Windows App..

[HideawayStudio]

Hi All,

I am new to this forum but by no means new to the retrocomputing / pro music scenes...

After only 35 years I finally got around to trying out a Cheetah SpecDrum for my trusty Spectrum 48K and I have to say it is a lot better than I was expecting..

https://soundcloud.com/hideaway-studio/ ... x-spectrum

As some will know, it is possible to load new drum samples into SpecDrum and Matt Harrison has already reverse engineered this process in order to load custom drum sets:

https://m-harrison.org/loading-your-own ... -specdrum/

The problem is this process is manual and somewhat time consuming.

The good news is that the 8-bit drum samples are fixed length and inserted into a data block in a tzx tape image in fixed length fields.

My wish is for a simple Windows application that allows you to drag 8 raw (or wav) samples into it, either allow you to name them or import the filenames as the drum names which are sanity checked and truncated if necessary and then loaded into a tzx file ready for loading into SpecDrum.

Is there anyone on the forum who might be able to help make this a reality?

All the best,

Dani Wilson, Hideaway Studio.

[equinox]

Unfortunately I don't quite follow the blog post because he's sometimes talking about absolute memory addresses and sometimes about "offsets".
Can you be a bit clearer about the requirement?

For example I'd be able to code something stated clearly like this:
"I provide 8 files which are each 100 bytes and I need a TAP file that will load those 800 bytes into memory starting at 16384" (my example is just made-up numbers)

[Ast A. Moore]

Unfortunately I don't quite follow the blog post because he's sometimes talking about absolute memory addresses and sometimes about "offsets".

I believe the starting address is 0x8400 and the offsets in the table are all relative to that. Basically, you load the samples into memory starting at 0x8400 one after another in this order: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 1.

[equinox]

Okay, see if this does what you want: https://CL4.org/specdrum/