TAP-to-Cart — TS2068 Cartridge Conversion
🔧 Project · 🌲 Evergreen · Owner: Jeff Burrell · 2022-07 → 2022-11
Converts a TS2068 TAP (tape) file into a cartridge image — a BIN for burning to EPROM and a DCK for emulators — so tape software can be run from, or made into, a cartridge.
Links
About
Jeff Burrell worked out how a TS2068 program maps into a DOCK-bank AROS cartridge image (documenting the .dck/AROS header bytes, using the 16K "States and Capitols" cartridge as a worked example) and wrote DCK-creation utilities — first a Windows-specific PowerBASIC version, then the cross-platform Python tool now hosted as 2068-TAP-To-Cart. It's evergreen: complete and usable, and doesn't need ongoing change to stay valuable.
It sits in a small ecosystem of community converters worth knowing about: a .NET console converter that another member (qwertyfan2000) was building with hooks for inserting relocatable Z80 machine code, and Ryan Gray's .dck info utility in his zx81-utils. The standard Spectrum tools TAP2BAS (TAP → BASIC) and bas2tap (BASIC → TAP) are the usual front-end to all of these.
Related discussions
- BASIC to cartidge — 55 msg · 2022-11-02 · groups.io
- Sinclair Spectrum / TS 2068 TAP2BAS recommendations — 15 msg · 2022-11-02 · groups.io
- Five more detailed questions about creating a TS2068 AROS cartridge im — 13 msg · 2022-09-15 · groups.io
- Documentation for creating and testing T/S 2068 DCK files with DOSBox — 2 msg · 2025-01-30 · groups.io
- Online TAP to DCK converter — 1 msg · 2025-03-30 · groups.io
- Online TAP to Cartridge Converter — 2 msg · 2025-06-17 · groups.io
- .dck file utility — 3 msg · 2026-02-04 · groups.io
In the meetings
Discussed in 8 meeting recaps:
- August 4, 2025 — TSU Meeting MONDAY
- July 7, 2025 — TSU Meeting MONDAY
- May 5, 2025 — TSU Meeting MONDAY
- April 13, 2025 — TSU Meeting SUNDAY
- January 6, 2025 — TSU Meeting MONDAY
- June 5, 2023 — TSU Meeting MONDAY
- November 7, 2022 — Timex Sinclair User Group Meeting
- September 25, 2022 — Timex Sinclair User Group Meeting with European Friends
Topics: Cartridges, EPROM & dumping · BASIC programming · Utilities & applications