Software spotlight: Cassette software for the IBM PC | Hacker News Reader

Software spotlight: Cassette software for the IBM PC

forum.winworldpc.com

32 pointssnvzz10 comments

The book "Inside the Apple IIe" had a program to digitize voice from the cassette port (https://archive.org/details/InsideTheAppleIIe/page/n341/mode...). The results were shockingly good.

I never had a IBM PC w/ a cassette port, but reading thru this article I see that EA's Music Construction Set had an option to output sound on the cassette port. It looks like the digitization method "Inside the Apple IIe" uses (looking for zero-crossings and making a 1-bit square wave approximation of the sampled audio) would work on the PC hardware.

Most people who couldn't afford IBM PCs and resorted to ZX Spectrum and clones, had to use the cassette if they wanted to use any kind of software.

You have forgotten the dreaded ZX Spectrum Microdrive - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Microdrive

At least in Europe until the ZX Spectrum+3 128K, drives were largely ignored not only due to faults, also due to their high price.

I cannot say how it was for the C64, because they were hardly seen on Iberian Penisula.

It's strangely sad that, despite all of the legacy cruft maintained from the original IBM PC until now, that ROM BASIC hasn't survived. Just imagine some hole in the memory map reserved for ROM BASIC, some dark corner of UEFI mandating the implementation of a vestigial ROM BASIC for compatibility.

The space originally allocated to ROM BASIC (and a user ROM slot) was taken over by a larger allocation for the BIOS over time. Seeing as BIOS compatibility is on its way out (or gone) with modern UEFI systems, you’d assume a ROM BASIC support would’ve gone with it had it continued.

I think the fact that just about everyone bought a PC with disc drives / DOS, and never used ROM BASIC directly meant PC clones just saved the $30 (or whatever) of ROM chips and loaded all of BASIC from disc.

PC clones probably didn’t bother with it due to a combination of ROM BASIC being copyrighted, DOS software not needing it, and GW-BASIC being available so people could run BASIC programs from DOS. Note that IBM included ROM BASIC on their PCs up until at least the early 90s.

Yep. I remember it for the PCjr but forgot about original PC support for it. PCjr's also supported ROM cartridges.

I think the core problem of the PCjr is it was trying to be all things to all people by being part PC, part low-end computer, and part gaming console.

As I recall my thinking at the time, the main issue with the PCjr was that it was compatible "enough" with PCs that nobody bothered to make software to take advantage of it specifically, and given that, the white box PC clones on the market got you a lot more computer for a lot less money.

Worse, it was sort-of (in)compatible with the PC just enough to be troublesome. 50 of these were donated to my high school because an elementary school couldn't use them and didn't want them, and my high school didn't want them but couldn't get rid of them because of donation contractual requirements.

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