Based on Санчез's page linked on mapper 186's wiki page, it seems like he did not have access to any of the audio data and was unable to get any further emulating this device.
A Mesen user has just sent me the audio recordings for 2 different audio tapes meant to be used with the Study Box game.
The audio data on the tapes is stereo, with one channel being actual audio (probably played via the tape reader's speaker?) and the other channel is data.
I can only tell that some portions of the audio sound similar to good old modems (i.e the data), and the rest is probably padding between data sections (a large portion of the audio is just a continuous tone, and sometimes silence).
I quickly tried using "minimodem" to attempt to extract the data, but it looks like the program cannot automatically detect the correct settings to use to decode the audio, and instead relies on command line parameters. Which means I get different results depending on what settings I try, and I have no real way to determine if the result is correct, or completely wrong.
I imagine someone who actually has a clue about these sort of things (i.e not me!) would be able to figure out how the audio is encoded, and how to get it back into binary format. Anyone feel like giving this a shot? I've attached a screenshot of what the audio looks like (~1/10th of a second worth of data) when it sounds like actual data.
A Mesen user has just sent me the audio recordings for 2 different audio tapes meant to be used with the Study Box game.
The audio data on the tapes is stereo, with one channel being actual audio (probably played via the tape reader's speaker?) and the other channel is data.
I can only tell that some portions of the audio sound similar to good old modems (i.e the data), and the rest is probably padding between data sections (a large portion of the audio is just a continuous tone, and sometimes silence).
I quickly tried using "minimodem" to attempt to extract the data, but it looks like the program cannot automatically detect the correct settings to use to decode the audio, and instead relies on command line parameters. Which means I get different results depending on what settings I try, and I have no real way to determine if the result is correct, or completely wrong.
I imagine someone who actually has a clue about these sort of things (i.e not me!) would be able to figure out how the audio is encoded, and how to get it back into binary format. Anyone feel like giving this a shot? I've attached a screenshot of what the audio looks like (~1/10th of a second worth of data) when it sounds like actual data.