> On my MSX1 days with games in cassette tapes, I moved all of them into floppy disks
> directly in the MSX computer. (a Brazilian MSX 1.1 Gradiente).
>
> First, the game had to be loaded into the MSX's RAM with RUN"CAS:" but without the ,R
> parameter to actually run the game. Then I would simply type another command to save
> the data from RAM as a file, directly into a floppy disk (I don't remember the
> commands). It was the only way to convert the cassette game into a file.
> It was a BSAVE command with start/end memory addresses, I think. I don't remember
> exactly what it was (it was the late 80's).
>
> I don't know how these .cas files in MAME we have today were converted.
CAS files for MSX don't support any non-standard loading schemes so, for the most part, they're just hacked releases which don't represent the real media where the originals came from. They don't even store the time between blocks and thus can't be used for preservation, as happened with the old Spectrum TAPs which were made obsolete by the TZX format.
There's a group of people that's redumping every MSX cassette they can get ahold of in TZX format (here renamed "TSX") which, even if it's not the ultimate preservation format, it's been proven to work for (almost?) all known cases in other systems, with no need for hacks.
There's someone currently working on adding this format to MAME's MSX core, by the way. Once it's done, someone from that team may be able to add all those dumps to the softlist (and hopefully replace any obsolete CAS dump with matching data).
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MSX .CAS format
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