[Coco] High(Er) speed cassette loading.

[John Kowalski]

On 12/30/20, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> wrote:
> 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?

This is something I've always been curious about - how far could that be pushed?

If I recall, it generated one full waveform at one frequency for a "1"
and one full waveform at a different frequency for a "0".
If we treated the positive and negative period of the waveform as
different units, we could double the data rate without changing
anything else.
If we used more frequencies, lets say 4 different frequencies to
represent "00", "01", "10" and "11" then we'd double the data rate
again without really requiring higher fidelity recording.
If we doubled the frequencies we'd double the data rate yet again for
a data rate 8 times the original speed..  which would be pretty fast
for tape!

I'm not sure how reliable this would all be but the first two ideas
don't actually require better fidelity, they only use the existing
fidelity more efficiently.

-- 
John Kowalski / Sock Master
http://users.aei.ca/twilight/sock