MC-10 Cassette Server is Online!

Day 5:

I spent a fair bit of time today downloading and running TRS-80 MC-10 games and utiliites. Unfortunately, the process was rough:

1. download the file
2. extract it from zip archive
3. load the .c10 file into XRoar
4. save it to .wav file using XRoar
5. awkwardly play it in the Mac Music app
6. organize all the new files

To be fair, many of the zip files already have a .wav format file in there, but it is still not a convenient process. XRoar is esptecially time consuming as the cassette menu controls can be a bit awkward and the conversion is done using MC-10 commands in MC-10 time. There is apparently a Windows utility to do the conversion, but I don't have Windows and it is not open source. Fortunately, I am familiar with the useful c2t utility by datajerk for converting Apple II format files to .wav and .aiff formats. I knew that the MC-10 cassette audio format was vaguely simlar to the Apple II (FM encoding), so I made some changes to make a simple command line tool for converting .c10 files to .wav files. I was so shocked when it worked, I had to double check a few times that I was playing my generated file rather than a comparison file I was using. I just posted the project code on github.

Even with the .c10 format files converted to .wav, I was still struggling with my Mac always importing them into the Music app, or not being able to rewind and start again with the Finder preview. Inspired by the Online Apple II Game Server, I uploaded the .wav files onto Google Drive, and wrote a small web app to organize and display them. So, now I can just hook up my audio cable, go to the MC-10 Cassette Server webpage, and play them right from there. I can even use an iPhone or iPad to connect. I will be adding more files and information there as I test everything.