Re: Apple II cassette drive.

[salfter@chakotay.ncc74656.org (Scott Alfter)]

In article <bNeq4.25442$_G1.409732@news1.sttls1.wa.home.com>,
Ernest <leucoplast@seanet.com> wrote:
>From what I've read, Apple had their own way of using a cassette drive,
>which was not the IS of 300 baud, because unlike other companies, Apple was
>able to transfer data at 1200 baud with no problems. So my other question is
>does the Apple II require a special cassette drive, or will a cassette drive
>from, say, a TRS-80 CoCo work on it.

If by "cassette drive" you really mean "tape recorder," then pretty much any
portable cassette recorder will work.  The Realistic CTR-60 that I got back
in '83 for my TI-99/4A has worked well since then with a CoCo 2 and a IIe.

The bigger question, though, would be why would you want to hook a tape
recorder to an Apple II?  All but the very oldest of Apple II software was
shipped on floppy disks (5.25" for most 8-bit stuff, 3.5" for some 8-bit
stuff and nearly all IIGS software), with maybe a few dozen titles from the
late 70s on cassette and (at the other end of the technology spectrum) fewer
than a dozen titles on CD-ROM.  The one time I had a tape recorder hooked to
my IIe was more for sh*ts and grins than anything else; having used tape
with TIs, CoCos, and Ataris before, I was more than grateful to have a pair
of 5.25" floppy drives with the II.

(For a while, though, I had an amplified speaker plugged into the tape-out
jack for playing WAVs snarfed from the 'net with some software I had written
for that purpose.  Nibble published a program in the early 80s that allowed
sounds to be sampled on the tape-in jack; it was fun to play with for a
little while, but the fidelity of 1-bit sampling wasn't exactly CD quality.
:-) )

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