1,697 minus 2
ZXF at long last does something useful and stumbles across a couple of MIA titles at the local car boot...
First appeared in ZXF issue 6 (Christmas 2003)
This has been an exasperating year of car boot sales. Week after week after week I've trawled through endless collections of James Last LPs, McDonalds Happy Meal toys and empty CD racks only to emerge empty handed each and every time. Last year I took home a Plus 2, a Plus 2A and a tired, but working Spectrum+, not to mention a whole load of books, casettes and joysticks; this year the ZX Spectrum and all its associated bits and pieces has been noticeable only by its absence in the fried onion-smelling field of bargain hunters that is my weekly sunday morning haunt.
Until a sunny October morning several weeks ago, when a mint condition Plus 3 smiled up at me from below a wallpaper table; it was a bargain at £15, but with only a tenner in my pocket I had to rush off to rustle up the extra cash and by the time I got back... well, you can probably work out the rest (whoever you are, you were jolly lucky).
I very nearly didn't go the week after - well we were well into autumn and the season couldn't last forever; the Plus 3 had been my one and only chance and I had blown it, or so I reasoned. But just like buses, boot sale bargains have that tendency of keeping you waiting for ages and then turning up several at once. And so it was that a rather motley bunch of cassettes caught my eye during my stoic trek on the 12th. Looking for Sinclair branded tapes (my favourite collectable), it was a ZX81 copy of Space Raiders that sounded the alarm somewhere within my subconscious as I sped past the table. As I backed up for a closer look I noticed it was surrounded by a few Mastertronic and budget re-release titles. Nothing special there. But then I spotted a two rather poorly designed inlay spines: quite clearly, on further examination, a couple of home-produced titles. Day of the Match, then, and Ball by Ball were both releases from a company called Video Software Limited. And I started thinking. Could these be MIA tapes?
Well I've been in that spot many a time before. Oh yes. At the car boot sale (though not this year, like I said). In the charity shop. All excited, I race home with the cassette - an obscure title I've never heard of from a software house I've never heard of (it must be MIA!) - boot up the PC and head straight for the WoS archive... and what do I find? Not only is the tape there in all its perfect TZX glory, but there too is its inlay, the instructions, a link to its review in Crash, SU and YS, and the AY theme tune ripped for stand alone players. In short, everything. And yet another ZX title gets added to the box of tapes under my desk that I don't quite know what to do with.
But this felt different. Call it intuition, call it precognition, call it more time than is healthy spent emersed in all this nonsense, but somehow I knew. And this time my search at WoS was rewarded. Missing In Action. Both of them. I cannot tell you just how chuffed I felt with myself. 1,697 titles were listed as known and missing, and I had just found two of them.
But the next bit I knew would be a problem. TZXing - the process of turning an honest-to-goodness plastic and rust cassette into a virtual tape file for an emulator - was something I had never managed to, erm, manage. Taper verily thumbed its nose at my PC's sound facilities (all on-board) and told me exactly where I could stick my Line In signal. And MakeTZX, Ramsoft's supposed thoroughbred converter ("MakeTZX now has an amazing feature that guarantees 100% failure-proof conversions even in the most difficult cases") simply sat and blinked a confused cursor at me as the Spectrum loading noises cruised on by. Everyone else could hear it as I adjusted volume controls ever-upwards - my wife downstairs trying to watch TV; the neighbours; the cat from number 12 wondering what new tom had wandered into its territory - everyone but MakeTZX, that is. Loading tones? What loading tones?
Apparently I'm not the only one who has experienced such difficulties. TZXing has been likened somewhere - I forget now where I read this - to a black art, that some achieve with ridiculous ease whilst others never get close to even the faintest whiff of success. The really infuriating thing about it was that I could get tapes to load into Spectaculator via the Line In port no problem at all - same 3.5mm stereo socket, same on-board sound card, same mono jack cable and same Sony cassette player: into the emulator it all went without so much as a squeak of protest. But Spectaculator does not make TZX files, so whilst this was an excellent solution to the problem of preserving some of my old BASIC programs, it was no good whatsoever for preserving MIA titles, since the requirement is by WoS that TZXs submitted are exact copies of the original tapes in all aspects (for example, the lengths of the silences between tones in the recording).
The MakeTZX documentation advises against sampling your Spectrum tape into a seperate sound editor and then running the audio file that it produces through the MakeTZX decoder. Instead it recommends you sample and decode all at once in MakeTZX's 'DirectMode':
"If a conversion in DirectMode has failed, then it would have failed even if you had recorded the samples into a VOC with your favourite sampler. Besides, consider that a digitally filtered VOC is not always better than a normal one, because the digital filter itself may introduce nasty errors"
But I tried anyway, using Soundprobe 2 (pressumably pretty much any sampling program will do the job). And sure enough it didn't work. I tried sampling in mono. And sure enough it didn't work. I tried increasing the bsample rate. And sure enough it didn't work. As a last ditch attempt I tried sampling in 8 bit mono as opposed to 16 bit...
And guess what?
It worked. It worked perfectly. That was all that was needed in the end. But can you find it in instructions anywhere? Can you Adam. Sinclair FAQ, please take note.
So MakeTZX verily purred along now. No problem. No problem at all. nNosir. And I end up, therefore, with two lovely TZX files and a couple of inlay scans. Off to WoS then - to the uploads page at www.worldofspectrum.org/upload.html, to be precise, where I make my four submissions (the two TZX files and the two inlay scans; the next task will be to type in the - rather verbose - instructions, which will be a job for the Christmas hols), one at a time.
What happens next? Well, the inlay scans have appeared already in the archive, however new TZX files take a while to be processed and are uploaded in batches rather than on a submission-by-submission basis. In a chance meeting with ADJB at the MicroMart fair in November he explained to me that submissions like this will need to be looked at from a number of angles - such as whether they are needed in the TZX Vault, and so on. Quite a number of people are involved in this process, each with their own specific duties, so this is really only the start of the titles' voyage to WoS immortality.
So it's back to the sidelines for me. And back, incidentally, to car boots. On the following week I spotted a boxed 128+ with four bags of accessories. How much? I cried. "Sorry mate - just sold it for a tenner. Nearly snatched my hand off, he did." Did I mention buses?
