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PostPosted: November 1st, 2013, 1:31 am 
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So, we've got lots of .T88s in our collection (thanks to you guys!). However, some research has indicated that some of these games had hidden games on their B-sides.

Logic tells me that, because tapes need to be dumped as WAV files and converted, the only way to find these games would happen to be if someone also happened to have dumped the B-side of the same cassette. However, I will go ahead and ask the dumb question: If we already have the dump of the A-side, is it at all possible to access the B-side using the file, or would we need to go hunting more?


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PostPosted: November 1st, 2013, 1:56 am 
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Well, I've seen both sides of the tape dumped into single file, but I highly doubt this might be a case with T88 ones. I haven't played too much with any PC-88 emulator yet, so I don't know if there's any counter while loading from tape. If yes, than you should check how much of the tape have been played while loading the game, how much is left and eventually try to start loading another game from that point. It'll definitely be a lot of work to check every tape image like this, but this the only solution I can think of right now. Besides nobody ever said that retro emulation is as easy as launching another game on your PS3 or other modern system and that's exactly why I love it. ;)

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PostPosted: November 1st, 2013, 2:26 am 
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I can try that, although the last time I even messed with tape drives was on a Commodore 128D that didn't really need it. ^_^;


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PostPosted: November 1st, 2013, 2:46 am 
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Please don't forget to share the information if you have found something and we will think of a way to separate any new game into another file. Like I said, it's going to be a hard and time consuming work, but this is also quite a nice and helpful way to contribute to the community. ;)

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PostPosted: November 1st, 2013, 2:48 am 
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Anything I can do to give back to the community that gave so much to us. It'll have to wait until later this weekend, but I'll manage.


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PostPosted: November 1st, 2013, 4:56 am 
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If you can get some sense out of this, using a hex editor you could look see what is in the .t88 files -

http://www.cug.net/~manuke/t88format.html


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PostPosted: November 2nd, 2013, 12:56 am 
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Which hex editor do you recommend? I'm looking into HxD right now.

I'm about a half of a first-year student of Japanese, so all that kanji makes my head bleed.

Edit: As it turns out, one of the tape images said to have a hidden game wasn't even for PC-88, but for the PC-6000. But I'll be thumbing through the .t88s we have all the same.


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PostPosted: November 2nd, 2013, 3:32 am 
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sutorippu wrote:
Which hex editor do you recommend? I'm looking into HxD right now.

I'm about a half of a first-year student of Japanese, so all that kanji makes my head bleed.

Edit: As it turns out, one of the tape images said to have a hidden game wasn't even for PC-88, but for the PC-6000. But I'll be thumbing through the .t88s we have all the same.


1. If you put that Manuke Station T88 Format page through Google Translate, it is fairly comprehensible.

2. It seems you are on the right track, thumbing through the files in hex, as one's brain recognizes changes in what is displaying in a file, and you can look see when it does change. I figure most file names are going to be in "alphabet", or roman characters, so you can enter the names in load commands more easily. ( Long time since I loaded tape images, so excuse any stupidity ).

3. HxD looks very good, and fancy. I might give it a go myself. I use a very old very simple one copyright 1997 - hedit - purely out of habit since last century LOL!, but it is not fancy in any way, so I can't really recommend it. :wink: HxD looks great.

4. I seem to recall ( I don't really have time to check ) that some formats of the load commands will list all files on screen if you don't specify the file name or an incorrect file name - "FOUND PROGA ... FOUND PROGB ...". Maybe I'm wrong - long time ago. Sorry - very rusty on tapes.


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PostPosted: November 2nd, 2013, 6:39 am 
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For some translation projects, I use MadEdit or MadEdit PV if the sources are not available.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/madedit/
http://code.google.com/p/madedit-pv/

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