On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Luke Crook <luke@balooga.com> wrote:
> I have a Rabbit turbo tape cartridge for the C64 from Eastern House. A wire
> runs from the cartridge that is meant to be jammed into the cassette port,
> connecting to (I think) the Cassette Read pin. * *Are there any particular
> advantages to this kind of tape fast loader?

If you do a lot of loading and saving of program data from tape, or
you need to read old Rabbit tapes, it can be useful.  I've never
worked with the C-64 version of Rabbit, but I do have a 4K ROM Rabbit
for my PET 2001-32N (3032) and I just found the original manual
(though it's water-damaged and needs to be scanned).

I personally have a shoebox-full of PET Rabbit tapes of stuff I wrote
c. 1979-1981 and of backups of commercials stuff (so I wasn't reading
the originals and so they would load faster).  One of my goals this
year is to fix my 2001N (it has unreliable IEEE operations and I
suspect bad 40-pin sockets), then rescue the contents of these tapes.
I have some good stuff on there, like a Scott Adams game run-time
engine I wrote as my first Machine Language program (without a
disk-based assembler).  I'd hate to lose all that stuff.

So unless you have a specific need to read/write Rabbit tapes, it's
mostly of intellectual curiosity (I wouldn't mind a ROM dump, though).
 I don't think it was as popular on the C-64 as other tape fast
loaders, but it was the only one I knew about for the PET.

-ethan

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