Recovery Process

Since I've had a few people ask about this...

I've always known that the tape for this game was in a box in the attic, along with the ZX Spectrum and Ferguson tape deck that I originally used to create it.

However, until I received my ZX Spectrum Next before Christmas, I'd never thought about trying to rescue and release the game.

Even then, I've spent most of my time on the Next writing a new tank battle game in Basic (coming soon!) and it was only recently that I decided to have a go at recovering my old text adventure when I had a day off and spare time to rummage through boxes.

The rummaging part was easy - I found the box within a few minutes and then dug out the tape deck and tapes and let them get to room temperature before I tried to do anything.

I then worried that a fifty-year old tape deck, and all the gunk it had collected over the years it was used, might damage the tapes when I tried to do anything with them, so I went on my own quest to buy some isopropyl alcohol.

After trying Hobbycraft, Homebase and Wykes with no luck, I ended up at my local old fashioned hardware store (straight out of the Two Ronnies Fork Handles sketch!).  Isopropyl alcohol - yep.  Biodegradable cotton buds - yep.

Back home, I carefully cleaned the read head on the tape deck, covering multiple cotton buds in dark tape-detritus in the process.  Once I was happy that the head was pretty clean, I then dug out a sacrificial tape (Trans Am) to work out the best recovery process.

I connected the tape deck to my PC and used Audacity to create a wav file, which I then converted to a .tzx file using  Retroconvert 1.0.8 and then copied this to my Next.

From there, I was able to load and play Trans Am - dead easy!

Unfortunately, when I tried to follow the same process for my Quest game, the audio from the tape deck was at a much lower level than the commercial game, and even with multiple attempts I couldn't get the .tzx version to load into my Next.

I then realised that I could actually just try loading the game directly into my Next using its audio port and cut out the PC middleman.  After a couple of attempts, I finally managed to get the game to load!  I then used the built in NMI option to create the .z80 snapshot file.

I tested this to make sure it loaded properly and then quickly set up this itch.io page to make it available!

Since then, I've been trying to recover the original data files from tape, but with much less luck.  I couldn't get a consistent volume out of my Ferguson tape deck, so I then decided to try my not-quite-as-old Sony Walkman (WM-24) which had much less fuzz in the audio.  Eventually, I did manage to load the data files into The Quill (or apparently so at least).  Unfortunately, as soon as the load was finished, The Quill just quit and rebooted.

I'll keep trying with this though, as I'd really like to recover the original data and fix the spelling mistakes in the game that are now glaringly obvious to me!

Finally, I've just gone back through the original PC-Audacity-Retroconvert route to create a .tzx version of the game, as I think this is usable more widely than the .z80 version.