Fukutake StudyBox

[jpx72]

Hello!
A friend of mine just aquired this intriguing Famicom attachment for playing audio tapes - the StudyBox.
But we have no tapes, and the audio recording is nowhere to be found. Supposedly these contain some data in the audio format too...

Anyone have these? Physical copies or the recordings to download? Thank you! 

[P]

I don't know where to find them but I think at least some of them has been recorded digitally because Mesen (and possibly Mame) added support for them.

[portnoyd]

I looked into getting one of these during my FC accessory binge but the price and absence of tapes (basically as hard to find as a cart for the Konami QTa adapter) turned me off. You're going to be hard pressed to find a tape to go with it.

[jpx72]

Thanks for the answers, yes from one of the conversations on nesdev I understood that nearly all tapes should be preserved, but I wasn't able to find them anywhere. Maybe they are already a part of newest goodnes rom packs...

[krzy]

Any chance to see the internals? Maybe we could then figure out the audio format and create its own recording to test it out? ;->

[jpx72]

I would like to summarize what I found out recently:
The tapes are supposedly nearly all digitised by "SourMesen" (or "Sour") into a proprietary format *.study (or *.studybox) to be emulated through Messen emulator.

"...new file format to hold the tape data (.studybox files.) This is a chunk format like RIFF/NSFe which contains both the tape's data (converted to binary data, not as audio data) and an embedded sound file for the audio track (could technically be any type of file, but mesen currently only supports 16-bit mono wav files.) The format was chosen because it removes the need of the audio data track (which removes 100+mb worth of WAV data per tape), makes it so that emulators don't need to incorporate an MFM decoder (which could easily be faulty) and doesn't require any complex code to load."

"If you own studybox tapes, you can use this program (https://github.com/SourMesen/MfmDecoder) to try and convert the audio tape recording (as 44.1khz 16-bit .wav files) into a .studybox file that can be loaded in the emulator."

Topic details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/ej1hxe/studybox_famicom_peripheral_emulation_is_now/

And a nesdev topic about hardware here:
https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14975

Author has not made those public, although I found a bunch of them online:
https://archive.org/details/fukutake-publishing-study-box

Unfortunately I haven't found out how to convert the *.study to *.wav to try it on real hardware. Any suggestions appreciated!

Of course I can do some internal photos to check out, will post later.

[P]

It was nice of him to include a program to convert to "*.study" but too bad he didn't made one that works in reverse.


I also think it would be better for preservation if data tapes are recorded with as a high resolution as is reasonably possible and stored in a lossless digital audio format like WAV or FLAC.

[UglyJoe]

It was nice of him to include a program to convert to "*.study" but too bad he didn't made one that works in reverse.

I'll take a look at it.  I might be able to make something that goes the other direction.

Edit: Nah, this is way too fiddly.  I'm pretty sure whatever I'd come up with wouldn't work with actual hardware.

[jpx72]

Thank you for trying!
I am at this with my friend and he just ordered another unit together with one tape. So give us a month or two (for shipping) and I'll post at least one tape in the flac/wav format.