Weihnachtsgruss (Computer)

This is probably the oldest preserved piece of software that I’ve ever written.
It’s called “Weihnachtsgruss” (Christmas greeting) and I guess the Christmas it refers to could be that of 1988, when I was 5 years old.
Could also be the 1989 one; sadly, the data on the tape doesn’t have a timestamp.

It’s a BASIC program for an Atari 600 XL (or maybe even an 800 XL, I don’t remember what I’ve owned) that I’ve found in my cassette tape collection.

I’ve included the high quality WAV file of the tape section as well as conversions to CAS and “raw“ format (as a8cas generates them) and the original source code (converted from the .raw using mistalro/atariconv).
Oh, and also a photograph of the tape that it was stored on.
A 90 minute tape containing about 18 seconds of audio.

The code doesn’t do much and it also doesn’t make much sense (I like the unreachable “Guten Tag”), but I’m so happy that I’ve found it and that I was even able to restore it.

What I did

1. Record the original tape using a Yamaha KX-300 tape deck and a Behringer Firepower FCA1616 audio interface as a 96 kHz stereo track into Audacity.
2. Save the result as a 16 bit WAV file.
3. Convert it to CAS and “raw” using a8cas:

    a8cas-convert weihnachtsgruss.wav weihnachtsgruss.cas
    new block...
    Attempting to recognize data block... succeeded: bit_length=0.001666
    Adjusted bit_1_0_diff = 0.000002
    End of data block at byte 132, found IRG=0.264733
    new block...
    Attempting to recognize data block... succeeded: bit_length=0.001668
    Adjusted bit_1_0_diff = 0.000019
    End of data block at byte 132, found IRG=0.246667
    new block...
    Attempting to recognize data block... succeeded: bit_length=0.001666
    Adjusted bit_1_0_diff = 0.000020
    End of data block at byte 132, found IRG=0.337937
    new block...
    Attempting to recognize data block... failed
    new block...
    Attempting to recognize data block... failed

4. Since the raw file contains the source code in a tokenized binarish version, use atariconv to create a text file from it again:

    ./atari weihnachtsgruss.bas
    Error:
    File number of variables= 0
    Actual number of variables = 0
    -----< Listing of file >-------------------------
    1 PRINT "Ich wuensche allen von "
    2 PRINT "ganzem Herzen"
    3 PRINT "F R O H E WEIHNACHTEN!"
    4 PRINT "MERRY CHRISTMAS !"
    5 PRINT "MERRY CHRISTMAS !"
    6 GOTO 1
    7 END
    9 PRINT "Guten Tag"
    10 GOTO 9
    -------------------------------------------------

Author

This code was written by Tim Weber (scy), who also restored it in August of 2018.