[Coco] High(Er) speed cassette loading.

[John Guin]

I was able to do this, but the reliability went downhill pretty quickly.  And only my machine could load the tapes.   IIRC, it would fail about 50% of the time.  The usual process was to save the tape at high speed, and then again at low.  Then load the high speed tape to validate it worked.

But with the reliability so low, I very quickly found out the time I was saving was being eaten by the overhead of ensuring everything worked.  So I saved up and bought a disk drive.

And frankly, for the day, 1500 baud wasn't too shabby for a cassette system.  Heck, that was faster than my modem!  Other machines used 300 baud, and some even saved twice to help with reliability concerns, so this wasn't too big a concern for me.

I remember one product that used tapes - but it was more like the Coleco Adam tape drive.  It was designed to be higher speed from the start and did not use cassettes.  There may have been some devices, but I don't remember them.

John  

-----Original Message-----
From: Coco <coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com> On Behalf Of Allen Huffman
Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2020 12:19 PM
To: CoCoList Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Subject: [Coco] High(Er) speed cassette loading.

On CoCoTak, I heard a reference to David Ladd experimenting with higher baud rates for loading from tape.

Before I had my disk drive, I found I could reliably CSAVE and CLOAD using the double speed POKE on my CoCo. Did anyone else do that?

Where there any "tape accelerator" products for the CoCo?

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