[sebhc] H8 tapes for Dave - archiving tapes?

[Scott LaBombard]

Jack,

> Input from anyone else on best practices for audio tape archiving would
> be appreciated.

I'm not sure if this qualifies as 'best practices' or not, but I have a
process that I go through with most all of my 8080/z-80  systems
when initially acquired.

Once the system is operational, one of the first things that I do is
to load up a system monitor that I wrote some time ago. Typically,
the only thing that I need to change in the monitor are the IO routines ...
then it's just a matter of burning an eprom if the system is eprom
capable, or toggling (perhaps 'punching' is a better term for the H-8 :))
in an Intel hex file loader that can load the system monitor via the
console.

The 'console' in this case is a laptop running a term-emulator. My
system monitor has a somewhat more elaborate Intel hex loader
(with error checking and such), as well as an Intel hex dumper
(again, to the console).

The approach is predicated on getting a successful initial load of the
tapes ... but once done, it's just a matter of 'saving' in I-hex format
while capture mode is on in the terminal emulator. I've succesfully
saved a variety of Altair, Imsai, and Heathkit tapes using this 
approach. The added benefit is that I can just use the I-hex loader to
reload the files whenever needed (using the text file upload capabaility
of the terminal emulator). If I don't have an eprom capable system
(and in my case the H-8's are not) ...I save the monitor itself to
tape so that I don't have to manually enter the loader again.

In the case of my H-8, the H8-5 cassette interface is now operational.
I like the H-8's approach to cassette software ...you can determine
start and end addresses to dump, and execution address quite easily
from the front panel once the tape is loaded. With other platforms,
you have to know the location and size of the data from the cassette
in order to save the correct range.

In my experience, the audio backup methods aren't always reliable.
Transferring hex files via a serial port is...


Scott

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