Loading BASIC programs from cassette tape to the Sega Master System #VintageComputing @benryves
Ben Ryves writes about getting software for the Sega Master System loaded via a basic cassette tape interface:
After I posted about the pattern filling modes on Twitter I was alerted to the BBC Micro Bot website which hosts a gallery of programs that produce impressive graphical output from very short BASIC programs (short enough to fit in a Tweet!)
I tried a few of them out but unfortunately ran into problems with a lot of them that use various tricks to reduce the original program text length by embedding non-ASCII characters directly into the body of the program. My usual approach to prepare programs was either to copy and paste them into an emulator (my emulator strips out non-ASCII characters on pasting, as these can’t be mapped to keystrokes) or to save them to a file and transfer that serially, and my own editor’s tokenizer and BBC BASIC for Windows both had a habit of mangling the non-ASCII characters.
The BBC Micro Bot website does not provide a way to download the BASIC programs directly but does provide a share link that allows you to export a disk image or play back the program from a virtual tape cassette. I don’t have a a disk drive attached to my Master System, but the tape option seemed promising…
See the video below showing a couple of programs being loaded from the BBC Micro Bot website onto the Master System and read details on the post here.
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