Gary Sparkes Jr. wrote:
I'm about to acquire an Apple //e with two DISK
]['s, a TS1000, and
I currently have a C64. I've got a tape drive for the c64 and i believe
ordinary tape decks work for the other two, also i've got floppy on the c
and the apple. Now comes the sticky part...
Having/getting these systems, How am I going to transfer software to
them?!
This problem was addressed and solved for the TS1000/ZX81 years ago.
Most programs for this machine which are available on the 'Net are
in "P" format and can be transfered to the machine from any MS-DOS
PC by means of the ZXTape utility, which is free. The data is
transfered from the PC via a simple cable between the PC parallel
port and the audio input jack on the TS1000/ZX81. All the required
instructions are included in the ZXTape .zip file (back to THAT
discussion again ;-) which may be found at multiple locations by
Googling for "zxtape"
ZXTape is pretty old so you may have to use a slow PC for it to
work properly (I have a 286 set up as a file server for moving
programs to my ZX81). There's a newer version (ZXTape3) for
Pentium-class machines but I've never used it.
Once you've LOADed the program into the TS1000 from the PC,
you'll be better off SAVEing it to tape via one of the many
high-speed tape accelerators which are also available free.
I have a hard drive attached to my ZX81, but prior to that I
used a fast-tape program which transfers at 4800 bps instead
of 300. This cut LOAD times on 16K programs from 5-10 minutes
to about 20 seconds.
Be sure to check out the archives at the Univ. of Trondheim
ftp://ftp.nvg.unit.no/pub/sinclair/zx81/
as well as the ZX81 pages at The World of Spectrum
http://www.worldofspectrum.org
Tip of the hat to Wilf Rigter, author of ZXTape.
Glen
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