Tales of VCF 5.0?

From: Jim Battle <frustum_at_pacbell.net>
Date: Tue Oct 29 01:25:01 2002

At 06:09 PM 10/28/02 -0800, dwight elvey wrote:
>Hi
> Actually, I was bummed. ...
> I had a Poly-88 setup but I think only one in 10 noticed
>and even then, I think only 2 in those ten knew what it was.

I spotted it, and I knew what it was. But how could you tell
that? Probably other people were the same.

> Of course, my display was all about tape recovery and not
>the Poly-88. I don't think, maybe, 5 people all together
>realized that.

That, I didn't spot. I noticed the waveforms on the wall, but amidst the
din (auditory and visual) it didn't register. I wish I had noticed,
though, since it is an area I want to spend some time working on one of
these years. Rather than letting it be lost to the moment, is there any
chance of you writing up your work and putting it online somewhere (even
posting it to this list and letting it get archived would work).

I've read a half dozen very terse summaries of emulators and such that do
this, but most work only on really clean tapes. They simply do some DC
correction, perhaps a bit of filtering, and then time zero crossings and
decode from there. Have you done something more sophisticated than
this? Some of the Sol tapes I've looked at are way too corrupted for such
a simple technique to work.

There are a lot of communication theory ideas that could be applied to the
problem directly; in addition, the file format is going to have some known
structure that could be used to help train the receiver and disambiguate
some cases.

I'd be interested to hear more.
-----
Jim Battle == frustum_at_pacbell.net
Received on Tue Oct 29 2002 - 01:25:01 GMT