12-04-2023, 06:06 PM
A number of Microbee owners have a floppy capable Microbee but no floppy or Gotek but still want to test out their 'bee and maybe play a game or 2 before they get a floppy or Gotek drive. As all Microbees have a built in Monitor (Holding both Reset & M will get you there), it will allow you to load in a tape (with R) then connect your phone or other WAV playing device to Tape In connector on your Gray cable and load in BASIC. Then from BASIC, load in a game in WAV form in the same way or cassette tape from a tape player.
Our current BASIC_5.22.WAV file is just a dump of the ROM that had been saved to tape and then the tape recorded to a WAV file. However, loading this file in via the Monitor, loads it at 2000h, so while in the Monitor you would need to move it to 8000h using the M command, then jump to the Basic Warm boot addy to start Basic. These new versions eliminate the moving process.
Load in either of the BASIC WAV files (takes 2.5min) and while still in the Monitor just type in G 2000. This will Go to 2000h where the WAV file loaded and the small header code will move it to its running address of 8000h to BFFFh. It then jumps to 8003h to warm start Basic. From Basic, LOAD will now load in your game via phone, tape player or whatever.
These were produced using ubee512 emulator running as an IC or PC85 and within their Monitor the BASIC rom code was moved to RAM, header code written and then Dumped out as a 1200baud WAV file direct to my PC's hard drive. Interesting in that the IC saves out the WAV file in sine wave format while the PC85 saves it out in a square wave format.
So in the MbeeTech Repository in the Microbee/Software/Tapes folder we place the following
basic_5.22e.wav <--- replaces exiting file
basic_5.25e.wav
Our current BASIC_5.22.WAV file is just a dump of the ROM that had been saved to tape and then the tape recorded to a WAV file. However, loading this file in via the Monitor, loads it at 2000h, so while in the Monitor you would need to move it to 8000h using the M command, then jump to the Basic Warm boot addy to start Basic. These new versions eliminate the moving process.
Load in either of the BASIC WAV files (takes 2.5min) and while still in the Monitor just type in G 2000. This will Go to 2000h where the WAV file loaded and the small header code will move it to its running address of 8000h to BFFFh. It then jumps to 8003h to warm start Basic. From Basic, LOAD will now load in your game via phone, tape player or whatever.
These were produced using ubee512 emulator running as an IC or PC85 and within their Monitor the BASIC rom code was moved to RAM, header code written and then Dumped out as a 1200baud WAV file direct to my PC's hard drive. Interesting in that the IC saves out the WAV file in sine wave format while the PC85 saves it out in a square wave format.
So in the MbeeTech Repository in the Microbee/Software/Tapes folder we place the following
basic_5.22e.wav <--- replaces exiting file
basic_5.25e.wav
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ChickenMan
ChickenMan