How "fast" was the ADAM tape drive?

[NeXT]

I found two brand new Coleco ADAM tapes and on the tapes as well as all over the net they say that you can only use their tapes s the tape drive workes faster than a regular cassette deck. My question is how much faster is it? When it is reading/seeking/writing, does ot look more similar to like a 9-track drive or is it slower?

 

[Bill_Loguidice]

I don't recall the speed of the drives, but it doesn't accept regular cassettes. You need to either modify a standard cassette or use one of the blank Adam ones. The drives are risky, plain and simple, with them just as likely to "eat" a tape as they are to read one. I've had many disasters over the years. With that said, it's pretty fast, relatively speaking, approaching or surpassing the speed of many disk drives of the time (with higher capacity). Speaking of disk drives, the Adam disk drive is very fast, though of course much lower capacity than the data packs...

 

[NeXT]

Hmm, well it still makes the ADAM look like another interesting system to find. I heard that the ADAM did eventually come with a disc drive however that was really late in it's production life, correct?

 

[Bill_Loguidice]

Hmm, well it still makes the ADAM look like another interesting system to find. I heard that the ADAM did eventually come with a disc drive however that was really late in it's production life, correct?

It didn't come with one, it was just available separately. The package was always the main unit with one data drive, keyboard and printer/power supply. I like it, but it's obviously rather a clunky system. Luckily I acquired a stand alone power supply so I no longer have to use the printer.

 

[patscc]

Adam tape speed

Adam tape speed

Data rate 1.4 kbps
Tape speed: 20 ips slow, 80 ips fast
Tape length: 300 ft.
Formatting: 2 tracks, 128 blocks per track, 1K per block

The controller is a MC 6801

This is from the technical manual.

For comparison, a regular CC travels at 1 7/8 ips

I checked on data rates for CC, and found a range from .5 ~ 2 kbps , supposedly some games used special loaders loading at 4 kpbs. See here for more a reference http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Compact-audio-cassette

patscc

 

[NeXT]

Thanks for the tech info. That is what I was looking for.
I guess I could look for an ADAM instead of a ColecoVision as the ADAM will acept CV games however like most older consoles I assume (more like know) that some pretty shiny pennies will be needed.

 

[Bill_Loguidice]

Thanks for the tech info. That is what I was looking for.
I guess I could look for an ADAM instead of a ColecoVision as the ADAM will acept CV games however like most older consoles I assume (more like know) that some pretty shiny pennies will be needed.

You can get a full setup for well under $100 shipped at most times. Again, I love my Adam/ColecoVision collection, but data packs are really not worth the hassle unless you're really going to devote a lot of time to the Adam. You can find disk drives, but those are going to run in the $75+ range.