ArduiTape/CASDuino/TZXDuino - The cassette player replacements

Thanks to the help of Rafael Molina Chasserot some new features have been added to the TZXDuino and CASDuino firmwares which has freed up some memory as well, which may lead to more features being added in the future. A percentage counter and a timer counter have been added to all screens so that you know how much is left of a file to play and how long it has taken to load. The OLED1306 and PCD8544 use completely new routines for the firmwares saving a lot of memory. Folder navigation is now different. Rather than using the Menu button on TZXDuino or the Stop button on CASDuino to return to the ROOT directory, if you press the stop button when no file is playing you will go up one folder only making it easier to navigate. TZXDuino The TZXDuino has had a menu added so that MSX users can set the Baud rate of TSX files so that they can load faster than normal. A few more emulator only IDs have been fixed so that they are skipped by TZXDuino. CASDuino CASduino has had a Baud Rate of 3...

Whilst it may seem there han't been much going on in recent months we have been working behind the scenes on improving and adding more options to the various firmwares and trying to improve the hardware. The main difference with these firmwares is that OLED 1306 screens are now fully working on all of them and that the PCD8544 has added as a screen option. I will go into the hardware changes needed for that at a later date. ArduiTape 1.5 What's New Added support for the PCD7544. Download from here. CASDuino 1.15 What's New Improved support for CoCo and Dragon Added support for OLED1306 and PCD8544. Download from here. TZXDuino 1.8 What's New Added ID2A Added support for PCD8544 Download from here. TZXDuino 1.8.1 What's New TSX support for MSX TSX files added by Natalia Pujol. Not officially supported and any bugs should be reported to her. Download from here.

You can go to my Etsy shop and buy my builds of TZXDuino, CASDuino, and ArduiTape with the standard 1602 LCD and coming soon you will also be able to buy the new version with the PCD8544 LCD screen.

It's been a while since I've updated CASDuino but I've been trying to bring the firmware in line with TZXDuino and ArduiTape to make possible integration of the three firmwares at some future date. The major problem had being getting it to work with the OLED 1306 screen which has now been solved. Included in this firmware update is a 3rd screen option which is for the PCD8544 which I have also been working on and am now almost ready to share instructions on. What's New:- OLED1306 Support PCD8544 Support Improved Dragon compatibility Improved CoCo compatibility (auto run on CoCo games has not been fixed yet but we are working on it.) You can download the firmware from here. There are also reports of improved compatibility with the Phillips VG 8020 MSX however as far as I know any incompatibilities were due to a difference in the hardware chipset so how this has happened is a complete mystery but a win I will take.

TZXDuino 1.7 This fixes issues with pause lengths that we never noticed before. It should fix games like Top Gun and Street Hawk for the Spectrum and make CDT files behave as they should for the Amstrad CPC. Changes. *Maximum pause length of 8.3 seconds due to the TimerOne library has been worked around. *ID20 Pause Block fixed. *Temporary fix for pause after motor control removed. https://mega.nz/#!aEt1VJKZ!ZFw-fP3bkNTtiPlbG_IllmR94Xni3KvIGUn6Jggfof8

After mentioning that I had gotten a CPC and attached a DIN to it so that I could connect it to the TZXDuino I have had a few requests on how to do it so I thought I'd try a guide. You will need to purchase 180 degree 5 pin female din that is chassis mountable. This is the type that I purchased except mine also had a mounting plate too. The standard 6128 cassette connector is wired like this. Each pin is numbered on the back so that you know which one you are connecting it too so don't worry if the pins are in different positions as it depends on whether you are looking from the connection side or the soldering side. I would use different coloured wiring for each type of connection. I used the following Ground - Black Data Input - White Data Output - Pink Remote Control - Brown At this point I added 4 male pins to the end of my wiring so that I could build a connector so that I could easily disconnect the DIN should I need to work on the cassette drive. N...

Now that I have my CPC464 all set I've been testing .CDT files and have noticed a few issues. The first is that when I altered the code that sped up things for the Spectrum I messed things up for the CPC so that has been rolled back. The second is that with the CPC the motor control and pause after blocks is very important and TZXDuino isn't calculating a long enough pause for some games which causes them to fail. This seems to be a limit to the TimerOne library of 8,191 milliseconds (1F FF). This obviously is a big issue that needs more investigation. Changes: *Fixed the garbled text bug (thanks to Rafael Malins Chesserot for that one) *Rolled back an update that made files load faster on the Spectrum but broke files on the CPC. *Added a 2.25 second delay on playback after a motor control pause to fix issues with compacted multiload games from http://cngsoft.no-ip.org/cpc_lzx.htm ToDo * There is a discrepancy between length of time of pause after block and what the ...

I've finally managed to get hold of a CPC464 so I can see what compatibility is like with TZXDuino. One of the first things I did was add a DIN so that I could connect the TZXDuino to it. Rather than the normal 5-pin DIN that the CPC664/6128 use I decided that as I already have the cable for the MSX I would add an 8 pin DIN. After some testing I found the best places to solder the connections and now it is up and running with full motor control. As there are no TOSEC like downloads for CDT files I have been using both CPCRulez and CPCPower for the downloads. TZXDuino compatibility is quite good with CDT files although there are a few that use the ID15 block which currently is not compatible but I did notice some issues. Some games seemed to have insufficient pause blocks and whilst they worked on emulators they did not with either TZXDuino or WinTZX playback. These were quite easily fixed by adding a pause block to the CDT file (Aliens, Ghouls and Ghosts, Turbo Outrun). Others howe...

TZXDuino user and Luca Forattini has added the ability to load AY files with Spec AY on any Spectrum with an AY chip to TZX. First you load LOADER.TAP from SpecAY . Once that is loaded just select the .AY file you want to load and away you go. You can download version 1.5 of the firmware from Here. You can download Luca's original version of the firmware which is for an Arduino Mega with LCD and buttons shield from Here. Interestingly Luca has added a filesize counter with his firmware so that you can see how large the file currently selected is. You can watch a video of Luca's TZXDuino at work here.

It's been a while since I've published anything on my progress on converting things to the Maple Mini so I thought I'd keep you up to date. I have converted TZXDuino to the Maple Mini and it is working but not properly. For some reason, even though it is using the same values as the Nano the frequency of the output is higher. So much so that fastloaders cannot be recognised and TAP and simple TZX cannot all register with the Spectrum. Oddly this would indicate that a microsecond for the Maple Mini is different to the microsecond for the Arduino Nano, yet the files play for a similar length of time. It's all highly confusing and I've put the project on the back burner for a while so I can concentrate on working any errors out of the CAS/TZXDuino Shield PCB. The good news being that when I was trying to figure out what was going wrong I noticed that TZX2WAV which we had been using as a benchmark to test our coding actually has a typo in it a decodes slower than the TZ...

Tales of Popolon is a new MSX homebrew game that is still under development but a ROM has been released so people can play. I've used CASLink3 to convert it to a CAS file and tested it on my Toshiba HX-10 with CASDuino and it works beautifully. Here is a link to the games Github page. Here is the CAS file to download. Enjoy!!

I've updated the CASDuino firmware so that it will load some games with Xroar but there has been no luck on an real Dragon. Can you please give it a test and let me know the results? Thank you. Download

ZX81 P and O filetypes have been added to TZXDuino. There is also a minor speed update that shaves a few seconds off previous load times. https://mega.nz/#!Ldkn3Q7L!hOjJVTZZQcRulmDdmVB19HxA04mFa9oAKAsEmrDD2qk We were hoping to have an update to CASDuino with working Dragon CAS files but unfortunately whilst we can get Chucky Egg to work we still can't get others to work. We are still working on it though.

I've managed to get the CASDuino firmware up and running on the Maple Leaf Mini. It's not perfect, there are issues with 3600 baudrate and it cannot store your baudrate selection as of yet as the Maple Mini does not have an EEPROM to store your selection but it is now working. Sadly whilst .CAS files on the MSX work, the ones for the Dragon have been broken TZXDuino is proving particularly stubborn at the moment, it is at least playing sound but is very stuttery and that also causes ID errors after the main loader.

One of my desires when I first thought about this project was to have something for everyone and for users to just be able to put their files onto an SD card and go but to remain cheap. The Arduino Nano was the perfect starting place for that but it quickly showed it's limitations, so now we're trying to port the firmwares over to the Maple Leaf Mini using the STM32Duino add on to the Arduino IDE. It's still very much a work in progress and there has been a slight hardware change, the original SD card readers we used are not compatible with the Maple Mini, but we have managed to get the Maple Mini version of ArduiTape working and playing .WAV files. Unlike ArduiTape you are not restricted to the frequency of .WAVs you can play and you also do not require a low pass filter to play the .WAVs What you need. Maple Leaf Mini 1602 I2C LCD   TF Micro SD Card Module Mini SD Card Module Memory Module LM386 Amplifier Module 5 button button board (See earlier blogs for instructions...

Inspired by Piotr Bugaj and his TZXDuino Shield I thought I'd take his PCB design and add the 2.5mm socket and some right angle buttons and get it so it will fit into a PP9 case. This is a whole new thing for me as I have never designed a PCB in my life or used Diptrace before. Luckily it's quite an intuitive piece of software that's easy to use. After adding a design for a PCB mounted 2.5mm and also the buttons I managed to design a PCB that should work. Now however it's finding a reasonably priced manufacturer for a couple of prototypes before maybe a production run. If you're interested in looking at the Diptrace and gerber file you can download them from here.