Jim Cheetham wrote:
Data saved via the audio channel was uncompressed - there was a floppy disk drive available, but that was pretty slow too. Eventually some bright spark came up with a data compression routine that worked for the audio channel, and all of a sudden it was faster to use cassette tape than a floppy disk. Go figure :-)
Actually, the c64 tape storage I/O facility could only recognise binary. Above a certain intensity, a "1" was registered. Below that, a "0". The problem was that the code that read/wrote the ones/zeros was far too conservative about both the length of the bits and also the padding bits. The speed-tape programs were about twice as fast, but I am sure they didn't actually do any data compression in the traditional sense.
I taught myself BASIC and then assembler on the C64. Ahh. Those were the days...
Cheers, Carl.
