JACKPOT

Copyright 1996

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What is this

I ran into a cassette at my parent's house. Based on the label it contained a single COMMODORE 64 program I wrote long ago. As a 9 years old. I'm guessing the age based on the music that is on it next to the program.

I'm pretty sure I wrote this with pen and paper then typed it in.

Is it good?

The program generates 3 random numbers, each between 0 and 5 and it congratulates you if they all match.

How to run

Use VICE Commodore emulator to convert the source file to a program and run it with the emulator.

petcat -w2 -o jackpot.prg -- jackpot.bas

Then run it:

x64 jackpot.prg

Getting it off the tape

I bought a Renkforce RF-CP-170 USB audio cassette digitizer. Looks like a cheap walkman with a mini USB connector, shows up as a USB soundcard in Linux, no extra software needed.

I started Audacity pressed record then PLAY on the walkman and fiddled with the volume slider to get a loud signal. I cut out the beeps into a mono wav file.

After quick search I downloaded the Windows version of Audiotap, ran it with wine and converted the wav file to a tap file. Tried to load this into VICE the C64 emulator, but no luck so I tried another program ubercassette. This time the resulting .tap file was loaded successfully into the emulator and I could play with it. I was surprised it was this easy. I was expecting more problems and fiddling with the wav to be honest.

Now I need to get the BASIC program out of the emulator. I couldn't find a program that processed tape files directly but I found programs working with floppy disk images. I had the idea to save the program to an empty disk image:

LOAD
PRESS PLAY ON TAPE

SEARCHING
FOUND JACKPOT
LOADING
READY.

SAVE "JACKPOT",8

Now I have a .d64 disk image file that contains the program. The VICE emulator ships with tools that can extract the data and convert it to ASCII characters.

$ c1541 -attach jackpot.diskimage.d64 -extract
$ petcat jackpot > jackpot.bas

flowchart TB
    Cassette-->|"Renkforce RF-CP-170"|Audacity
    Audacity-->wav[".wav file"]
    wav-->|ubercasette|tap[".tap file"]
    tap-->|LOAD|VICE
    VICE-->|SAVE|d64[".d64 disk image file"]
    d64-->|"c1541 extract"|prg[".prg file"]
    prg-->|petcat|ascii["ASCII text file"]
    ascii-->GitHub

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