EDOS C64 Tape Image Creator by SLC of Nostalgia
=================================================

Disclaimer: You're pretty much on your own, and I accept no responsibility for any harm this program 
does to your PC, your sanity, you in geneneral, anyone or anything around you. Neither do I have any
datafiles available to give you to render tapes with this program. Since both the EDOS system and its
data is still under copyright you will have to provide the data files yourself if you own the legit
EDOS CDs. You may only distribute this program free of charge and you are not allowed to make profit
of it in any way. Now, with that out of the way...


What is this?
==============

This is a small tool that allows you to create .tap-files from original EDOS master files, are
you lucky enough to own some (or maybe even you own a CD or two? Please get in touch!).

It only supports Commodore 64 tapes (but this might change in the future) and those are the files
with the extension .A44 on your EDOS CDs. You can load the file either by dragging it into the window
or just push the "Load EDOS" button and browse. If you stick with drag and drop, the active directory 
won't change, so if you're converting a lot of files you may want to leave your active directory where 
you store the generated .tap images.

There's a tiny database grid inside the application. Here's a short description of what the fields are:

Offset     - offset inside the file where the tape block starts
Size       - total size of the block, including the EDOS header
Gap        - pause value infront of a file as defined in the EDOS header
Gap length - attempted calculation of the duration of this gap in seconds
ID         - the file type ID in the EDOS header telling the duplicator how to render the file
Format     - description / name of the loader type. May not always be right because same duplication code
             was used for multiple formats that resembled each other

Also, you'll notice whenever the Gap value is 0x0001, it'll round down to something near 0 (actually it'll
show as 0 in the gap length). I do not know if this is the correct way to deal with this pause, but it makes
sense in respect to the formats using this. I will only ever know for sure if I get to investigate a dump of
a such game.

In addition to the table, it has two options that are self explanatory, but I'll mention them briefly here anyway.

Split double sided tapes:
--------------------------

Some EDOS files have a special marker that tells the system that the following files belongs to side 2
of the tape. If you enable this, you will be prompted twice for a filename when creating the tap-file,
one for each side.

Correct ROM headers on write:
------------------------------

The EDOS tapes have some very strange formatted header and data files for the ROM files which does not
match the Commodore kernal standard. Checking this option will create 100% valid ROM files. This setting
is by default switched off, as the spirit of this program is to attempt rendering the files as similar to
the real EDOS hardware as possible. Having limited material available for testing, it cannot be 100%
guaranteed that this is achieved.

Credits:
=========

SLC    - for the program itself, testing and some additional work on reverse engineering the tape loader-format
Ymgve  - for most of the reverse engineering work, including decrypting the header (which only contains the catalog 
         info, rest of the stuff is left unencrypted!), and for providing some test data. Oh, and the decrypt
         routine and table used to display this info is shamelessly stolen from him.


For questions, and ESPECIALLY if you for some reason have any hard facts, software or hardware for the EDOS system,
please get in touch with me at: trs@c64.no and/or Ymgve at ymgve.aa@gmail.com.

