A8CAS - software for reading/writing Atari 8-bit cassettes

About A8CAS

The aim of the A8CAS project is to create software to read, save and archive tapes for Atari 8-bit computers.

Early Atari computers could store their programs on Compact Cassettes. Lots of commercial software was also sold on tapes. Some of the tapes employed different tricks to prevent creating illegal copies. A8CAS aims to correctly read and write all such tapes.

A8CAS is inspired by existing utilities, Ernest R. Schreurs' WAV2CAS and CAS2WAV. Schreurs' tools however did not support tapes with non-standard data (copy prevention mechanisms), and reading tapes from low-quality audio files was very unreliable. A8CAS addresses both of those issues. A8CAS now provides a superset of WAV2CAS' features.

A8CAS consists of:

• liba8cas a C shared library that contains all routines needed to read and write cassettes (support for CAS, HEX, FSK and sound files WAV, OGG, FLAC etc. is implemented). The library can be used in emulators and drivers for SIO interfaces such as SIO2PC;
• a8cas-tools - a set of command-line tools that contains a8cas-convert, a utility similar to WAV2CAS/CAS2WAV. The tools use the A8CAS library;
• atari800-a8cas - a modification of the Atari800 emulator, that uses liba8cas to load and save tape files (CAS, HEX, WAV, OGG, ...).

Contact

This software has been created by Tomasz Krasuski. You can contact me by e-mail: kr0tki (at) poczta DOT onet DOT pl. Feel free to share questions or suggestions related to the A8CAS project.

Download

All source files are available under the GNU General Public License ver.2. See COPYING for details.

To download the liba8cas library, a8cas-tools and/or atari800-a8cas, go to the SourceForge download page. The Windows an OS X archives are self-contained - they do not require any external dependencies. When building from sources, the dependencies are as follows:

• liba8cas requires libsndfile;
• a8cas-tools requires liba8cas;
• atari800-a8cas requires liba8cas, in addition to other dependencies of an unmodified Atari800 emulator.

Example tapes

See Links for a few sources of CAS files that can be used to play with the emulator's new features.