Re: Cassette Capacity

["winston19842005@yahoo.com" <winston19842005@yahoo.com>]

On Nov 30, 12:26 am, "Albert D. Kallal"
<PleaseNOOOsPAMmkal...@msn.com> wrote:
> At the time, blank floppy disks where in the $7-9$ range for ONE floppy. I
> had a floppy drive, but disks were expensive.
>
> So, I grabbed a little relay from Radio Shack, and plugged that relay into
> the cassette recorders' on/off jack (the smaller jack, right beside the
> microphone in jack that most table top cassette recorders had).
>
> I then just simply hit the play + record button, but the "pause" was now
> controlled by the apple...
>
> I then wrote some software to read sectors of the disk into memory (I about
> 40k of data), I would then start the tape, and do a bsave...when done, stop
> the tape, and then continue reading in the next 40kb of data. I recall is
> took 4 of these, but since it was automatic, I could pop in a disk, and walk
> away...
>
> I seem to recall that a 45 min tape, each side was good for a whole floppy
> disk, but I was not using the full side of the cassette. Given that one
> could purchase el-cheapo cassettes at discount stores for about 30 cents, it
> was a heck of a lot cheaper to archive un-used floppy disks at $8 a piece...
>
> I never was a hardware guy, but hooking in a simple relay into the game
> (paddle) port, and a bit of software to read the floppy into memory and
> start a bsave was quite easy.  It was so easy to do, and it is this kind of
> ease of accomplishing tasks that gives me such fond memories of my Apple
> II+...
>

That was how the TI-99's cassette worked, it controlled the motor in a
similar way. That allowed it to do cassette file operations as well.
However, it was still painful due to the pause between each set of
data, the "sync" part at the beginning of each record, and any padding
to the record (record lengths of only 64/128/192 bytes supported).