Atarimania Forum

Not sure this is the right forum for this subject but does anyone have information on Turbo Tape or Turbo CD interfaces?

I didn't even know high speed tape interfaces existed and now I've heard a rumor of a similar interfaces for standard CD Players, not CDROM drives but standalone audio players.

Not getting very far searching the A8 Newsgroup or Googling. Lots of forum talk but not any relevent links to product descriptions or schematics. All I've learned is some keywords and a couple of details.

- Turbo Tape 6000 (6000 baud interface. From Germany?)
- Turbo Tape 2000 (interface from Czhech Republic? [spelling?]. Note that's "2000" as in Y2K or futuristic, not 2000 baud] )
- Mega CDs (not the ATR images).


That's about all I've learned so far.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

phsstpok wrote:- Turbo Tape 6000 (6000 baud interface. From Germany?)

You can find lots of info, schematics and software for this hardware modification at:

http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~sgl/ata ... rb6000.htm

Everything is in English

Turbo tape interfaces were almost a standard in Eastern Europe where floppy disk drives were very expensive. The Rambit modification was also sold in the UK. I think the Mega CD Interface is from the Czech Republic.

There's still a lot of information that hasn't surfaced on the Internet, whether it relates to software or hardware. That's why the Atari is so fun

--
Atari Frog
http://www.atarimania.com

Another interesting link: http://www2.asw.cz/~kubecj/acz.htm

--
Atari Frog
http://www.atarimania.com

Thanks for the links!

I did stumble upon the Atari in Czech Republic page just before getting back here.

Exciting stuff!

I wonder if there are conversion utilities and Turbo Tape emulators, like CAS2SIO but for the high speed tape formats.

I purchased my first Atari drives in 1984-1985, nearly five years after I bought the 800. It would have been interesting had I learned of these interfaces back then.

It's more or less just a curiosity to me now.


Phsstpok

In the UK there was a similar hardware/software combo product called 'Rambit' sold by Derek Fern/firm (microdicount) and i think his name was Dave Richards or something like that, the originator of Rambit (the hardware was the speed mod, the software allowed you to convert existing tapes to high speed format)

From wehat i remember of the Czech 'Turbo' cassette upgrade, it relied on the fact that the prgrams had already being hacked as it did'nt have the convertor software to convert standard tape games to turbo format

This is because it used a cassette based dos with a format similar to spartados, so you had to crack the game program to binary file format first, the nice thing is though, you could copy appened files created with superpacker 1/bewesoft and also cruncher 5 files (from what iwas told

I actually have the MegaCD interface that uses a standard Cd player. But like you I am looking for addition information.