AIM65 and Arduino as a "tapestation" with SD-card

[DerTrueForce]

In commercial devices of this nature, you sometimes see that the storage device has an interface of its own to select the tape/disk. The computer it's connected to remains entirely unaware of the extra interface; it just thinks new media has been inserted, if it's capable of detecting such.
Such an interface would take the form of at least one button to cycle disk images(or tape dumps), and optionally some kind of display(possibly a character LCD).

[whartung]

You would need an external interface for the Arduino. That was always the case before, only back then we use the tape counter.

If you interfaced it with the AIM, then you have to bootstrap the AIM with the control software to talk to the Arduino. You can get around that by having a button(s) on the Arduino that queues up the "first" file or the "bootstrap.dat" file, or whatever, so that you can alway easily load that without any communication from the AIM.

Otherwise, you need some kind of interface to talk the Arduino via the AIM, your PC, or something else.

[oz6ym]

Hello group…
By private mail, i got a link here I have to study closer:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180107231 ... apedevice/

and software to:

https://github.com/mrWheel/KIM_TapeDevice

Se for your self.
vy 73 de OZ6YM, Palle

[whartung]

It's kind of interesting that the AIM tape interface didn't just use the KIM interface, or at least was compatible with it.

On the one hand "what did it matter", but on the other, the KIM was a pretty dominant little board.

I don't recall the KIMs tape baud rate, and I do recall the "turbo tape" (for lack of a better term) that was a bit of software to make the KIM load and save programs faster.

I know the KIM wasn't anywhere related to the, what was it, Kansas City interface?

Anyway, at a glance it looks like the two interfaces (KIM vs AIM) approached the problem quite differently.

[GaBuZoMeu]

The audio tape format of the KIM (and that of the SYM) is described in the SYM-1 Reference Manual (pages 138, 139).

[Chromatix]

Amusingly, one of the few machines to directly support the Kansas City tape format was the BBC Micro. But even then, most tapes actually used a faster 1200 baud variant, rather than the 300 baud standard - and 1200 baud was the default.

Probably more people are familiar with the ZX Spectrum's tape format, though, along with its use of border rasterbars to show that the thing was working.

[oz6ym]

I belive, making an Arduino based tape-interface, it would NOT be a problem to make the interface changeabel to different interfaces, where it only depence of changing 2 tones and the speed.

AIM65 has two tape-interfaces, the AIM65 and KIM-1 interface. I have never used the KIM-1 interface, but I think I would add the KIM-1 interface as a selectabel interface, in a kind of menusystem.

de OZ6YM, Palle

[kazzie]

Chromatix wrote:

Amusingly, one of the few machines to directly support the Kansas City tape format was the BBC Micro. But even then, most tapes actually used a faster 1200 baud variant, rather than the 300 baud standard - and 1200 baud was the default.

Probably more people are familiar with the ZX Spectrum's tape format, though, along with its use of border rasterbars to show that the thing was working.

Acorn used the Kansas/CUTS format (at 300 baud) on all their early machines (System line and Atom). The BBC specified 1200 baud for their new microcomputer, so Acorn adapted their existing implementation to meet this.

[GARTHWILSON]

Related, I just ran into this page on the treasure-filled pagetable.com site:
1200 Baud Archeology: Reconstructing Apple I BASIC from a Cassette Tape