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johncl
Registered: Aug 2007
Posts: 37 |
Turbo Tape, how does it work?
I have always been curious about how turbo tape really worked. I know that the tape drive originally could only read 50 bytes per second which would take a whopping 21 minutes to fill up the whole memory. I was always under the impression that games used compression to speed up tape loading (Just did a test with Giana Sisters which took 4 minutes to load).
Did Turbo Tape fiddle with the speed that data was written and read to the tape? I didnt think that was possible (only thought that was how they sped up disk reading/writing). If anyone got a good resource at how e.g. the well known Turbo Tape works, please post a linky here. |
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enthusi
Registered: May 2004
Posts: 677 |
There is also supertape format.
3600 baud used in Input64 tape-mag.
It has the option to save/load in high speed mode as well.
7200 baud. Would make it hellish fast too but too unreliable to be called a proper load/save I"d say.
Same goes for that AR-Superturbo. Even the manual says: dont use it when you need your data.
About graham: yeah, the ROM-load sets the thresholds according to sync-signal. TurboTapes SHOULD/could really do that too.
Maybe you dont have to wait all too long to see it done :) |
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johncl
Registered: Aug 2007
Posts: 37 |
Hehe at 7200 baud you could do a tape movie playback that updated a 7x7 charset image at 2 frames per second! Imagine the quality video you could have (and a few errors here and there wouldnt be too annoying). |
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algorithm
Registered: May 2002
Posts: 705 |
Quote: Re: Action Replay super turbo. If the assumption is made that the C2N doing the saving is going to be the C2N that will be doing the loading then it's possible to make the bit rate quicker without any fancy timing calibration. :)
Yes certainly. Infact the data could be saved with more density. Superturbo was just below 1k a second if i remember rightly. |
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enthusi
Registered: May 2004
Posts: 677 |
@johncl the problem with tape loaders is not flipped bits.
That wouldnt hurt and would be rather simple to correct, but MISSING bits. (or extra bits)
Those are pure evil hell to deal with... |
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algorithm
Registered: May 2002
Posts: 705 |
For fast loading speed, simply pack the data as efficiently as possible before saving. I remember most of the games available in the stone ages (ie vendetta) that would load nearly the full 60k of data or so when the load time could have easily halved if the data was packed beforehand |
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iAN CooG
Registered: May 2002
Posts: 3197 |
Quote: For fast loading speed, simply pack the data as efficiently as possible before saving. I remember most of the games available in the stone ages (ie vendetta) that would load nearly the full 60k of data or so when the load time could have easily halved if the data was packed beforehand
mainly because there were nearly no packers at that time, at least before 1985 =) |
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Mace
Registered: May 2002
Posts: 1799 |
Vendetta (c) 1990 |
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algorithm
Registered: May 2002
Posts: 705 |
Quote: Vendetta (c) 1990
And a tonne more of others. If data took long to load, would have also been a good idea to play music, show a picture while next part was loading or even let the user interact in some way (eg subgame - shinobi) etc. Would not make a difference in the complexity of tape mastering as the tape loading would be under priority with everything else running in the background.
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johncl
Registered: Aug 2007
Posts: 37 |
Well, there are some Mastertronic tape titles that does have a minigame in front of it. Invade-A-Load was one of them and I remember its on the Rogue game at least. What I find interesting is that many games had fullscreen bitmap pictures that you could see while it was drawing on the screen, basically adding another 20-30 second to the loading time. :)
Of course it was cool back then as you got tired of staring at a blank screen. When loaders came with Galway music pumping out the mono speakers we never wanted to go back. :) |
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algorithm
Registered: May 2002
Posts: 705 |
Ahh yes, the memories of the rambo music with the picture appearing gradually as the tape was loading the data.. ahhhh |
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