SviCas2Wav
News:
- 2000-01-23: A beta of SviCas2Wav is released.
What it is:
This programme converts the cas-files of the emulator to wave-files that can be recorded to tape and in that way loaded on a real Spectravideo. When I first released SviWav2Cas I didn't really realise that one wanted to go the other way around, since I already had the software on my SVI... But since I have
received a couple of inquiries regarding how to move the cas-images to a real cassette to play on the real thing I have now made a SviCas2Wav programme. This is a real beta – if you try it, please report if you got any problem that you think is a bug.
Problems or notes:
When saving the wave on tape, the speed of the recorder should not be a problem, but the sound level could be! Take your time to finetune the volume to be the same as on cassettes saved by the SVI. Another thing that may be a problem is the space between files, which are very short. If you don't find the second file after having loaded the first one, try to rewind a short bit.
Download:
SviShell 
News:
- 2002-02-09: SviShell v1.2 released!
- 1998-12-20: v1.1b: Name changed to SviShell... (Minor updates too.)
- 1998-12-18: SviFrontEnd version 1.0.BETA is released.
What it is:
SviShell is exactly what it pretends to be: a frontend/shell/launcher for the Svi emulator. Even though the emulator has a quite advanced configuration system a frontend can be very usefull, if you e.g. work only in Windows, have to start with many different settings, or if you're lazy.
The new version, 1.2, is now available; the biggest improvment is that it now supports WDMSound. Please note that only the executable is available; if it doesn't work, you most probably miss some files. In that case, download the complete v1.1 installation, run it, and then upgrade with the v1.2 executable.
Download:
- Version 1.1b – Complete installation: sfe1_1b.zip (1 835 007 bytes)
- Version 1.1b – Executable only: sfe1_1bud.zip (44 058 bytes)
- Version 1.2 – Executable only (update): sfe1_2ud.zip (45 094 bytes)
A little story...
When I was just a small boy at six years age, (i.e. about twel... oops, fourteen years ago), my father had a Computer. It was fantastic – it was a Spectravideo 328.
I loved to play some of all those games we had, and most of them, even those made in BASIC, was very fun to play. My father used mainly a monocrome screen, since he worked in CP/M and needed 80 charactes which really isn't showed very well on a TV, so occasionally, mostly during rainy days (my mother thought I should be out in the fresh air most of the time), we, my impressed friends and I, plugged in a small TV and sat for hours enjoying the powerful graphic and sound... Sigh...
Dad, look what happens when I do POKE 65268,201!
Pretty cool huh?
Anyway, playing was fun, but when I grew older I wanted to do something with the machine, so around the age of eight I started to learn BASIC, which I got quite good at, and I also tried some Z80 coding, but in the beginning, since I didn't have an assembler – I didn't even know what it was – I made only very small programmes... (Imagine: I wrote them by hand on a piece of paper, and when it looked good I sat down and assembled it by hand. Then I wrote a loader in BASIC, took care not to do any errors, forgot to save, wrote 'run' and pressed Enter... The computer crasched. Oh well... Eventually I got pretty good at that too.)
But as time went by, as they have a tendency to do, the Spectravido begun to impress lesser and lesser on my surroundings, and at last my father bought a PC... Yes, it was a good machine, and there was a bunch of programmes and games available... But, somehow, I missed the challenges that the Spectravideo provided. There one could, and had to, tell exactly what one wanted to do, and it was easy to do powerful thing on ones own, since it was easy to communicate directly with the hardware, and since the OS was BASIC, so I still played around with the old Spectravideo when I have the time.
Naturally, when I many years later saw that a person named Jimmy Mårdell was developing a Spectravideo emulator for PC, I got very interested...
