Loading tapes - how very old school

Nostalgic trip into tape loading - brings back a lot of memories

I’ve mentioned this in passing a couple of times, but it’s actually pretty straightforward to hook up the audio output from a computer to the ESP32 Rainbow. It works surprisingly well.

Now obviously, there are much more efficient ways to get games up and running.

Z80 files are great - they are just snapshots of the ZX Spectrum’s state so load instantly.

TAP and TZX files are also really good. These are completely accurate representations of the waveforms that would have been on the tape. They aren’t as fast as Z80 files as you need to “play” them. But on my emulator they load around 3-4 times faster than the original tape would. And you have the bonus of seeing the loading screen and any whacky turbo tape loading effects.

We’re now really close to the funding goal - so do please check out the Crowd Supply page for the project.

Thanks as always for your support!