I was actually testing MSX Taper you know, when I have discovered that my old homecomputer is having this odd behaviour... I used to create a wave file with a game on it (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and I set it up to load at the speed of 3200 BAUD (bps); then, I took the wave file and burned on a CD-R and copied on my iPod.

If I try to load the game from a CD-Player, there's no way to load it at the speed of 3200 Baud... the only choice I have to see it loading is to make it load at the speed of 2400 Baud, and again it fails to load ( at the very end it gives me the message "DEVICE I/O ERROR" )

If I try to load the game from my iPod... even using low volumes... even with sound equalization enabled... it works. Always. Even If I set the speed to 3200 Baud


I'm thinking that after loading games from the iPod for too many hours, my MSX is having an identity crisis and now it's thinking that it is actually an Apple II Well, I really don't understand why my MSX prefers my iPod than my CD Player, do you have any idea about this strange behaviour ?

BTW I'm actually spending some time thinking about adding the possibility of creating directly MP3 Files, since you can already buy an unexpensive-Chinese MP3 player for about 10-15 Euro these days, on eBay and directly in a lot of stores everywhere. With 1Gb onboard you can approximately store up to 150 games on a single device... that's a lot of games

And since a MP3 file encoded in mono at 160kbps seems to be well recognized on my MSX, it's definitely a worth feature IMHO.

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my MSX is having an identity crisis and now it's thinking that it is actually an Apple II

Its nothing bad being an Apple but if your MSX has mental problems it should perhaps start therapy. What if you play the mp3 in another player (your PC perhaps)?

Every single file I have tested was working properly under OpenMSX ( I'm sorry if I have to talk about the "other" emulator, but BlueMSX isn't available on Mac OS X and AFAIK it doesn't support yet WAV files as virtual tapes )

I played a lot with various devices, and no CD player worked 100% stable, but handhelds and mp3 devices did a good job.
I have 2 versions about unstable CD players behaviour: one is uneven spinning rate and skipping (even if they have anti-skip feature), the other explanation I saw on some site (don't remember where, but it had an oscilloscope screenshot) - square waves get broken on low-cost electronics from which most CD players were made.

If with 3200 bps it's still bearable on some CD players, when it comes to turbo loading on higher rates, you can forget about them.

I wrote about my findings at MicroWAVer's site log already 2+ years ago, but it seems you prefer to rediscover things yourself.

can you point me the url of the article?

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I wrote about my findings at MicroWAVer's site log already 2+ years ago, but it seems you prefer to rediscover things yourself.

Yes, that's true... but, hey... I'm too lazy even for reading the instructions booklet of my mobile phone (and that's why I have just been billed 30 Euro for some internet connection that I wasn't even aware of having done )

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cax.nm.ru/msx/packed/log.html 08/10/03 - I discovered that loading from MP3 encoded at 320 kbps from WAVs generated by MicroWAVer works ! It's better than using Audio CD, sound quality of which is affected by CD burner, player cache, quality of CD itself and other factors. So portable MP3 player is the best device for 100% stable loading. 23/11/03 "-cd" and "-cd -c" modes generate a sine-approximated wave (like msxf2w does) instead of square-wave. This result in more robust performance of WAVs played from audio CD, and smaller MP3s. 17/07/05 - MicroWAVer 0.91: mostly a bugfix release (yes, after about 1.5 year from the previous one !) I started to write this version because I found a very stable way to load WAVs/MP3s into MSX: using my DVD player (DivX-capable, based on mtk1389 chip). I just switched off all sound filters in DVD's menu and it works 100% stable. It didn't fail even once this way (and I had a lot of problems setting appropriate volume on my PC and portable CD player in the past). And it's very convenient to connect MSX to TV and to DVD which is already there !

Ok ok... I promise that I'll read all the documentation available online next time

flyguille: I wanted to post the link, but cesco was faster