Apple IIe cassete audio loading BIG ploblem ERROR message

Hi Heemin828,

There's a couple of different pathways you could go down.

1) You could ignore the cassette audio and just work with drives. Get a disk drive card and some drives and bypass cassette completely. (Most people only use tape long enough to bootstrap themselves to run disk drives anyway). This also means you could use a solution like Floppy Emu. 

2) If you have an oscilloscope, you can start probing down the signal path to see where things "go wrong".

I will say, if it's starting to load (and it does seem to be), I'd keep trying to work on the setup you currently have. Apple audio in is notoriously finicky.

I had the best luck driving off an iPad. I think the isolation and the extra "oomph" on the iPad headphone jack helped.

By the way, your english was fine :-)

Chesh

The problem is you are using amplified audio and that will always be a problem unless you just happen to land on a "good" output level.

As ChesireNoir mentioned, if you got a scope that would be your best option for finding the correct ouput level... Trick is to say just below saturation. There is a possiblity that the error could also be a RAM error, but the error message you're seeing suggest it's the signal level.

heemin828 wrote:

hmm I got another error

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10i2JSHGds4rh1UvrPcT4WxeFho7kZ-GC/view?usp=drivesdk

(sorry idk how to upload image)

CHKSUM ERROR

I don't think there's much question, the checksum suggests you are close but either too low or too high so bits aren't detected correctly. If curious, I can get into the details but that's not likely needed. FWIW I've had no success with a laptop. I always end using an old droid phone with headphone jack. Couple of things you could also check on the laptop....

Connfigure for mono output, make sure any signal processing is diabled (no bass boost, digital enhacements, etc), and verify you got a good cable. A desktop system's audio card with line-out would likely work best.Since you have a scope. I can test what level works then you could try to dial that in. You want to maximize the signal level but below saturation level.  

Cassette tape was unreliable and difficult when it was new.  It is has not aged well.  The volume must be just right and the tape and cabling must be right.  Using different cables often meant readjusting the volume.  It was always a hassle to make work.

It is possible, but seems unlikely, you have a problem with the Apple hardware.  I would think a RAM issue would be the most likely problem, memory  and other problems can be tested using the self test.  Sometimes memory works when cold and then fails when the computer is warmed up.  I would let the computer warm up for 10 minutes before I rebooted into the self test.  The self-test is activated by holding down the open-apple and closed-apple keys at power-up. In the enhanced //e and //c, a shifting  checker-board  pattern appears on the screen for about a minute, changing slightly every five seconds or so. If all is well, the checkerboard display is replaced by the words, "SYSTEM OK" on the screen. Otherwise an error message is display.  If you have memory error you will get a  RAM  0 0 0 0 0 0 0  type of message where one of the 0 is replaced by a 1 to indicate the bad memory chip.  If the message looks like * RAM 0 0 0 0 0 0 0, the * indicates the problem is with the aux memory on the 80 column card and not main memory on the motherboard. Again, this is an easy test just to confirm the computer is working, but probably is not the problem. I would expect you will get a SYSTEM OK message.

Most people don't actually use cassettes tape anymore.  Instead they use some old mp3 player or ipad/ipod setup to provide a much better quality signal to the cassette input port using standard cables.  You can download wav files of Apple // cassette software from https://cowgod.org/apple2/tapes/ to have known a known good software image.  Try feeding it the audio signal  with some device to eliminate the cassette tape or player problems at about the midpoint in volume.  I have not had great luck with laptop output and setting volume, although I would think it would not make much difference, in reality the mp3 player seems to work much better.

I can understand your desire to see it work before spending more money on a disk controller and disk drive/SD disk emulator.  Today most people find free *.dsk files which they downloand and then copy to a SD card for the disk emulator.  Then the dsk file boots like a regular disk would boot from the emulator.  They are very reliable, fast and easy to use.  I have many different emulators and I suggest the WDrive from ct6502.org or the Floppy Emu from bigmessowires.com as good quality, economical devices to start with.

Tape wasn't really used much on the Apple II as soon as the Disk II came out.  Really by the time of the //e the cassette ports were an anachronism.  The //c, //c+ and IIgs didn't even have it.  Many clones didn't either.

If you're serious about Apple II, you should invest in some kind of solid state storage.  Retrocomputing is not a cheap hobby.  If you want to do it, invest in the right stuff.

There are many options for storage devices out there, some using EPROMs, EEPROMs, SD, USB, etc.

Several good options...  FloppyEmu or wDisk -- emulate a floppy drive, require a floppy controller card of some kind.  Use Micro SD or SD card respectively.

Ian Kim's SDisk II Plus or CFFA 3000.  Slot based cards that emulate a floppy drive (or also a hard drive in the case of the CFFA 3000).  SDIsk II Plus uses SD card, CFFA 3000 is CF card or USB.

Booti, A2 IO Rpi, Dan ][, several others...  USB for Booti or Micro SD for A2 IO Rpi or Dan ][...  these are ProDOS block devices (hard drive emulators).

There are several SmartPort emulating devices which can emulate a SmartPort hard drive using a floppy controller or a Yellowstone or LiRON card.

If this help, I ran some tests, and there's a clear sequencing when looking on the scope, so I measured and found the following levels that worked and didn't work:

AppleIIe Cassette In Tests.PNG

Two important things to note...

1) I disabled all the headphone jack processing, and left a 50-50 balance, the asciiexpress player was maxed at 100% and the audio mixer was set at 100% for the browser.

2) I could not get the hi-fi files to work, I had to use the lo-fi files.

2b)  If you don't understand which of the two, if you're using LOAD you use the sample that is preceeded with the ], if you use the monitor load select the sample starting with *. I only got this to work with LOAD:

Lofi option.PNG

First, the self test display is backwards.  You want to replace the third chip from the left as you face it from the front, not the right as you have boxed in your photo.  Common mistake because Apple numbered it backwards.  Some people simply piggyback the new RAM on the old one and repeat the self test before doing the actual repair.  I usually just replace the chip.

You can use any 4164-150 or the faster 4164-120 RAM chip.  The MT chips are often thought to be less reliable than other manufacturers.  You can get them easily on ebay, but I would get it from jameco.com or mouser.com or digikey.com.  Something like

https://www.jameco.com/z/4164-150-Major-Brands-IC-4164-150-DRAM-65-536-Bit-65-536x1-150ns-with-Page-Mode-DIP-16_41662.html

I would remove the chip and solder in a DIP-16 socket, then insert the chip into the socket.  Here is a good video of the entire process and includes some other things to think about. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZY-F57zZVs

heemin828 wrote:

...

Can I change it with the RAM of the RAM card?

Yes, but if the chips are so cheap, why mess up a good RAM card, unless of course everything is socketed.

heemin828 wrote:

I think that I wouldn't need an 80-row RAM expansion card unless I worked on a document.

That is not the only use case. At least 26 games in the Total Replay collection require 128K RAM, including Prince of Persia. Also you would not be able to run any applications that require double high resolution, like Apple II DeskTop.

If you are trying to load audio files from either a laptop or smartphone it will always give you issues.

To improve reliability you need a stereo-to-mono cable to convert the stereo output of the source device to mono (which also decreases noise a LOT).

Once you do that then your load reliability shoud improve.

Also, level matching is key - it should be fairly loud, but not so loud to distort the waveform.

When the cassette interface was designed it was designed with low fidelity low quality tabletop tape recorders in mind.  High fidelity tape recorders acrually had a lower reliability level than a cheap portable tape player.  Ironic but true.  And the input has to be MONO.

CVT wrote:

heemin828 wrote:

...

Can I change it with the RAM of the RAM card?

 

Yes, but if the chips are so cheap, why mess up a good RAM card, unless of course everything is socketed.

Completely agree...  Don't unsolder good chips out of an 80 column card.  Just buy a replacement chip.  In fact even if they're socketed...  just buy another chip -- you really need a working 80 column card for a large portion of Apple //e software.

softwarejanitor wrote:

 

heemin828 wrote:

...

Can I change it with the RAM of the RAM card?

 

Yes, but if the chips are so cheap, why mess up a good RAM card, unless of course everything is socketed.

Completely agree...  Don't unsolder good chips out of an 80 column card.

I agree with softwarejanitor - do not mess with the RAM on the 80 c0lumn card, you will certainly want a working 80 column card on a //e before you are done.

"Deflate" is one of the compression algorithms used by PKZIP. The opposite of deflate is of course inflate.

It was also used by PKLITE, a tool to transparently compress binary executables. I imagine that the "Puckman" you have was transparently compressed by a similar tool.