Transferring ZX81 tapes to .TZX or .P

[TMD2003]

Spectrum40 saw me wave some cash in Simon Ulyett's face at the Cronosoft stand. Two of my purchases were, technically, for the Spectrum's grandad. I don't own a ZX80, but I do have a ZX81, and both ZX80 Pacman and ZX80 Kong have versions that will run on the "ZX80 with 8K ROM", i.e. the ZX81.

The tapes are fine, and I've made working WAV files of them all (96 kHz - no, really, I did - and 8-bit mono), all of which will quite happily load into EightyOne via its WAV loader... at normal speed. Each one is two blocks, though - an initial loader with a bit of preparatory machine code followed by the main program, which is not unusual for the Spectrum but (as far as I know) almost unheard of on the ZX81 and ZX80. Hence, I'll probably have to convert them to TZX so that the two blocks are contained in one file.

EightyOne has an internal "save this block to TZX" feature on the WAV loader, and this has produced two working ZX81 TZX files. For the ZX80 WAVs, it's consistent, but consistently wrong - it'll stop converting before the end of each block, producing a file that looks right but which the emulated ZX80 can't read.

I've found a Java-based converter on ZX81Stuff, but that creates more problems than it solves, converting a working WAV into a TZX that's all over the place. The slightest imperfection in the signal, and it throws a screaming eppy-fit - not ideal when tapes are far from being paragons of perfection in the first place, even if they've only just been recorded. The resultant TZX looks like the tape has been put through a shredder.

Does anyone know of any reliable WAV-to-P-or-TZX converters for the ZX81 (and, consequently, the ZX80, because they should work the same way)?

[bodkinz]

This might be a good place to look.

http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/tapeut ... rview.html

Good luck

[TMD2003]

I saw that on the same day I made the post. It's quite a tricky program to use, and even though the ZX81 waveforms make it visually obvious what is a 1 and what is a 0, the program doesn't fit the data bits in the correct space and leaves stray peaks.

One contact on Sinclair ZX World says it'd be a long and painful process to make it work...

[Andre Leao]

I use ZX81 Tape Converter. It is very easy to work with...