Because of terrible prices of disk drives/diskettes there were hardware modifications of tape drives to obtain higher transfer rates.

Most famous was called TURBO 2000. It required hw modification of tape drive. Small and inexpensive interface was built in tape drive and allowed speed about 2000 baud/original speed. Typical use was to load from tape 3-4 standard blocks long loader and then load the program in high speed. There were also lots of cartridges done with such loaders/monitors etc. Later there were speeds up to 9600 baud. These speeds were very unreliable. Loading looks like Sinclairs with the exception that the Antic was turned off because of high speed (horizontal bw stripes).

Turbo 2000 (61 KB WAV) WAV format sample of start of SuperCobra.

Turbo 2000 loader screenshot

The loading was very fast. Longest programs (International Karate) took only 4-5 minutes to load. It was done with no blocks loading. There is short pilot tone, then the header with the name of the program/length/start etc. then again pilot tone and the program in one long block. Shortcomings are obvious: the program must contain only one block and starting address. No load-time screens and such things were allowed with the format. Conversion was not straightforward. It was not possible to use it in for loading from Basic etc.

Turbo Monitor 2204 screenshot

When I sold my Atari in 1991 there were lots of new things.

For example - there was tape oriented DOS called TTDOS made. It used TURBO driver as B: (or T:?) in blocks mode. It was possible to use cassette in disk like mode (except for random access).

There was also TURBO based CD interface. It didn't use CDrom drives but standard music players. The interface was faster than TURBO and one CD contains all the programs from Prague UG.

This page accessed  times. Atari pages accessed  times. Last modified: Sun Dec 5 19:22:36 1999
(c) 1999 Jindroush
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