Hey there, I am currently active in a private project to convert A8 tapes to disk. This is NOT the A8 preservation project and I am NOT creating (PC) CAS or WAV files! Instead, I am just using the A8 and some old programs (e.g. Howfen Tape to Disk and CasDis) to transfer the old cassettes to diskette, so they can still be used on the A8, but with diskette speed.
Think I processed 342 cassettes right now, 232 of them worked alright from diskette (copied with Howfen T2D and CasDis), alas 110 did not work (due to non-standard block length and other copy protections). But evil as I am, I am also using two freezers for the tapes that did not copy to disk or did not work from disk (The Freezer! and The Reset Machine) and so far it looks like approx. half of these 110 tapes (or more?) can be made into disk-versions that way.
Regarding the 232 Howfen T2D versions, loading looks exactly like the cassette loading, meaning you see the same loading screens and counters/countdowns on diskette if there were any (or Atari blue or simply blank screen if these were used) on the original cassette. The created disks are bootdisks (90k or 130k) without any VTOC or Dir. and must be booted with the Option-key to disable Basic.
Alas, the Freezer versions do not load like that, they have absolutely no loading screens (since the games have to be freezed when they are completely loaded) and either load the OLD-OS into memory (The Freezer!) before loading the game-data or they load the whole (?) 64k memory (?) back (The Reset Machine). And errm, for the freezers it is important where and when the freezing takes place, otherwise the freezing often does not work. But even when it is possible to freeze a program, the diskcopy often does not work at all (shows garbage everywhere and is therefore unplayable) or works only after some extra work (in some games, e.g. Zaxxon you have to lose one live for the garbage to disappear, in other games e.g. Green Beret you first have to lose all lives for the garbage to disappear). So in the end, while loading, they are not very different from ordinary pirated/hacked/cracked copies. And due to the extra things one has to do before playing (e.g. lose one or all lives), one may still prefer pirated fileversions over these "strange" freezed versions...
Think I will upload these Tape2Disk versions and Freezer versions of original A8 cassettes to either AOL or pigwa or maybe both... ?!?
P.S.: I also have a tape-adapter with SD-card inside, so I can theoretically playback WAV files on the 1010 data recorder. But alas, the tape-adapter is from China and has several serious bugs that make working with the A8, the 1010 and this adapter next to impossible (90% of the transfers fail due to the strange and faulty behaviour of this adapter). Think I have to buy another Tape-with-SDcard adapter, but it looks like they are only made in China nowadays...?!?
