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One Step Forward One Step Back

The Bad News
In the last blog I said I was trying some new hardware. It was a nice cheap MP3 player SDcard combo that would've taken the need for some of the libraries out of the Ardui code and freed up memory for conversion on the board.

Unfortunately the MP3 player could not recognise filenames and would not be able to display them on the screen making it difficult to choose what games you wanted to play and making that board a dead end. 


The Good News
Whilst playing with the MP3 player we realised that some games didn't convert properly with cas2wav at any frequency so whereas we thought it may have been a frequency issue it was actually a conversion issue when using players. By adding a couple of seconds silence at the end of each WAV all loading issues have been solved even at higher baud rates so now the only games with issues are bad archives.

The new version of CasTools for MSX games can be found at the following link.

Arduitape CasTools



The Ugly
The Ugly isn't accurate because the next step for Arduitape I'm hoping will be beautiful but it is a major step and a test of my abilities. 

After finding cheap STM32F4 Discovery boards on the internet I'm hoping to convert the project to that board and set of chips. This will be able to do all the conversions for all machines on board without anything having to be done beforehand by the user. It will also mean less construction so it will be much easier to build. 

However the change in code and the coding skills required is ugly.

Also Andrew Beer is still working on the original to see if it is possible to do the conversion on board. The project is still very much alive.


I will keep you all updated

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