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11.6) How can I convert my commercial boot tape into a cassette image file?

mailto:ernest@pi.net (Ernest R. Schreurs) writes:

For those of you that like ALL classic Atari software, there is now a
way to store all software that has been recorded on cassette tapes on
the hard disk of your PC.  I have written a program that is similar to
the SIO2PC utility written by Nick Kennedy.  But this one is intended
for use with cassette software.  You will need the following items:

Any PC equipped with a sound card and about 50 to 100 Megs of free
disk space to work with. The sound card should be able to sample sound
at a sample rate of 44.100 Hz mono.  The sample must be recorded into
a .wav file.
You need the wav2cas program to convert the .wav file to a .cas file.
The .cas file is a digital cassette image file that only contains the
data that is on the cassette tape.  Once you have that, you can throw
away the .wav file.  The .cas files are typically 16 to 64K, so they
are relatively small.

To load cassette files into your Atari (i.e. boot a digital cassette
image) you do not need a sound card.  You do need a SIO2PC cable or
similar device.  You also need the cas2sio program.

The wav2cas and cas2sio programs should be available from the archives
of Umich by now.  They have been put together in one zip file
wav2cas.zip, along with the documentation and the 'C' source code.
You can download it through the web interface at the URL
http://www.umich.edu/~archive/atari/8bit/Emulators/Peripherals/wav2cas.zip
Note the capital in Emulators and in Peripherals.
Thanks to William Kendrick for helping me get it uploaded there!
You can also try the gopher stuff:
gopher://gopher.archive.umich.edu:7055/11/atari/8bit/Emulators/Peripherals/

Steven Tucker, the author of APE, has added support for this file
format as of version 1.15 of APE.  It looks real neat, so try that out
too!  Thanks to Steven for adding a nice user interface for these
cassette images.  He did a nice job.  I am hoping other using are
willing to write some programs to get more enjoyment out of this
underrated storage medium.

My stuff is available totally free for personal use, so I hope you
enjoy it. Read the docs about the conditions.

Keep those XL's/XE's humming.
If you have any questions feel free to E-mail me: mailto:ernest@pi.net