From: "Jim Lilly"
Subject: Hello.  re:  dat audio
Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 16:02:13 -0400

My name is Jim Lilly and I'm also in this strange little group of folks
tyring to squeeze dat audio out of computer dat drives.  I had stumbled
across your page long ago, and then it disappeared for quite a while.  Was
very glad to find it again when it came up in an Alta Vista search for
'ardat' and 'firmware'.

Anyway, I thought I'd let you know how our research is going.  I've had some
success in making this process work.  Using the V275-15 firmware from the
web, we've been able to burn some eproms and make non audio drives audio
capable.  Hoo-Ray!  Using this method we should be able to audio enable the
following models, which (I believe) all use a One Time Programmable eprom
chip:  4320NT, 4520NT, 4540NT, 4521NT, 4330XT, 4350XT, 4331XT, 4590NT,
4590XT, 4322NT, 4542NT, and the 4522NT.  I've only had personal experience
with a couple of these models, but it should work for all.  And if you know
of anyone who's trying to flash these models with the 2.75 firmware, I'm
pretty confident that it can't be done; that they need to physically replace
the eprom.

There were a couple of obstacles that we stumbled through that I'd warn you
about.  The V275-15 firmware has to go on a 2 megabit (256kbyte) blank chip.
But luckily (and much to our surprise) we've found that even if your drive
has a 1 megabit OEM chip, you can simply pop it out, pop in the 2 mbit chip,
and things work just fine!  At least it has on my 4320NT drive.  I believe
we've found a version of the 2.63 audio firmware, which will fit on a 1 mbit
chip, but we haven't tested it yet.

Also, finding 1mbit and 2mbit blank chips was a real bear.  Plenty of places
to buy them in lots of 100 or more, but hard to find in onsey's and twosy's.

On the software end, I have an internet friend who's working on a solution
and seems to be very close.  We met via the internet when he was looking for
audio dat tapes.  He's a software engineer, and he's written a program that
will do all the play and record dat audio functions.  I believe he's working
on the final piece of the puzzle right now.  He's working at developing code
that would correct un-readable frame errors.  Both an audio dat deck and the
computer dat use low level error correction.  But in an audio deck, if there
are un-readable frames it will interpolate and fill in those frames with
appropriate best guess values.  The computer dat doesn't do that (and will
produce ugly pops & screeches) and my friend is trying to reproduce that
interpolation via software.

Whew!  Anyway, that's about where things stand right now.  What I'm hoping
is that I can link up with you and your contacts and fill in the missing
pieces.  While my friend is working on the software, I've been trying to
work on the drives with the flash firmware with absolutely NO luck.  I've
been using 3 programs:  the fup.exe out of the dell package, flashdat.exe
which I can't remember where I found it, and rompaq.exe from the compaq
site.  I believe we have a copy of audio capable firmware which will work in
these drives, but I can't flash ANY firmware onto these drives.  The compaq
flasher fails to find any devices, but that might be because it's looking
for the compaq proprietary scsi card.  The fup and flashdat seem to begin to
work, but end up failing with a "Write Command Buffer Failed" error.  So if
you or a friend could point out the errors in my ways or give me a tip I'd
be forever grateful.

Thanks for your time, Ade.  If you'd like I could send you a cd of the first
show I was able to extract with my computer dat drive?  I was so happy after
all the reading and research I'd done to be able to finally squeeze music
out of that 4320 drive...

Take Care,
Jim


Date: Fri, 07 Apr 2000 07:37:51 -0400
From: Jim Lilly
Subject: Re: Hello.  re:  dat audio

The OTP's will definitely require replacing the original chip with one you
burn yourself in an eprom burner.  The flash eproms should be able to have
their firmware upgraded via software program or a flash dat cassette, but
I've had no luck with these.

Thanks for forwarding my email to your friend.  Possibly we both hold a
piece of the puzzle that when combined would give us the entire picture.

I moderate an e-mail mailing list of around 360 people, and several of
these people are tapers who take their portable dats to live shows and
record (also a couple of radio show folks who record their shows to dat).
I'm sure you're well aware of the expense in getting that music off of the
dats and into the computer for burning to cdr.  My friend Mike & I are
currently using a Panasonic SV-3700 pro dat deck -> digital rca cable -> to
a box called the SonicPort which processes the signal and passes it on to
the computer via a usb cable.  Once in the computer the programs of choice
seem to be cdwav for splitting the 'one big wav file' into seperate tracks
and cool edit if any sound editing or sampling rate changes needs to be done.

I'm not really sure why this project intrigues me so much.  Maybe it's just
because the current way of doing things is so convoluted.  I mean the dat
audio on the tape is 1's & 0's, and computers really like 1's & 0's; so it
would seem it should be much easier to get this audio off the tape and into
the computer.  Oh Well....

Once again, thanks for the kindness of a reply, Ade.  I can certainly
relate to being busy and having limited time to update web pages.  My live
music list, which is in serious need of updating and tweaking, is at...
http://www.labs.net/eeccph/music/ngtrader.html

Take care,
Jim Lilly