[Color Computer] [Coco] CoCo shots in Dutch newspaper video on retro-gaming!

[Rick R.]

Hi,  all of this talk about the speed of the Coco's cassette i-face.  One idea I've been kicking around was taking all of my
programs (basic and bin files) and saving them (CSAVE or CSAVEM) on a CD.  Here's the idea:

The programs would be recorded/saved as an "audio file" (mp3) on your pc (by connecting cass out on coco to line input of
sound card).  

The simplest method would be to save each program as a MONO mp3 file.  Because the "audio" (data - as if it was recorded on
cass. tape) is Mono, the file size for a mono mp3 would be very small.  If you average the time it takes to load a good size 
program at 3 minutes, an mp3 at 3 min. would be about 1.5 megs (depending on the bit rate you record the mp3s 
at). Theoretically you could save about 466 programs on 1 cd.  Just play it back on any cd player that can play mp3s (walkman, 
dvd player, etc.).  Or if you have a 128meg mp3 player, you could save about 85 programs on one 128mb memory card.  Naming
the file would be just naming a music file (name it whatever you want).

Another method would be to make an audio cd where you would have 2 seperate "strings" of data/programs (one on the left 
channel and one on the right) and save the 2 "strings" as 1 long stereo mp3.  You could store about 53 programs per CD.  Burning an audio cd reqires more steps (which requires audio editing software).  The advantage of having this kind of disk is that it will
play on anything that plays audio cd-r's (older walkman, home cd player, boombox, etc.).  You could go further by giving track
numbers to each individual program.

The only disadvantage to either of the two methods is that you have no motor conrol - in other words, you would have to stop
the player after each program finishes loading.  Not a bad trade off for mass storage.

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: James Diffendaffer 
  To: ColorComputer at yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Wednesday, October 25, 2006 2:22 PM
  Subject: [Color Computer] [Coco] CoCo shots in Dutch newspaper video on retro-gaming!


  > I did a number of tests (and several demos) way back when that showed 
  > that the Color Computer cassette interface was faster than the
  > Commodore floppy drives. This involved other folks' C-64s, as I 
  > wouldn't own one of the things on a bet. (Even now).

  The Coco cassette interface was 1500 baud and the 1541 speed was
  supposedly almost 300 bytes/sec or ~2400 baud - the IEEE protocol
  overhead making it around the speed of the coco cassette. 
  However, every time I tried that argument with a C64 owner they told
  me they had a fast load cart or replaced the DOS ROM with a product
  called JiffyDOS. A lot of C64 games even had a fast loader right on
  the disk. Fast loaders managed around 4K/sec and made the DOS easier
  to use.

  I think it's safe to say that fastloaders were pretty standard issue
  for C64 disk owners and it made the CBM drives much faster than the
  Coco cassette interface. It wasn't as fast as the Coco disk but I
  think it's more of a 'my computer is better than yours' issue than
  reality. One surprising fact is that the most common FastLOAD cart
  was from Epyx and it didn't support saving at high speed.