26
The
VIC
20
User
Guide
Care
of
Cassette
Tapes
When you use a new tape, balance the tension on the tape by fast
forwarding it to the end and then rewinding it
to
the beginning. This will
help prevent load errors.
Buy short tapes:
15
to
30
minute
at
most. This will not only reduce your
search time when running programs from the middle of your tapes, but will
ensure
that
you are using thicker and stronger tapes that are less likely to
stretch
or
break with use. Stay away from bargain brands; they tend
to
cause
load errors more often than high quality, low noise tapes.
Store your cassettes in a cool, dry place, away from any magnetism.
NOTE: One of the most hazardous places to store tapes
is
on
or
near
your television, which produces a magnetic field strong enough to alter the
data they contain. Never touch the oxide coating on the tape itself; the
surface
is
easily scratched and can be damaged by the oils in your hands.
Cassette
Tape
Write·Protect
You can avoid recording (writing) over programs you want to save by
write-protecting them. Look
at
Figure
1-8;
each cassette tape has two
write-protect tabs, one tab for each side
of
the tape. Breaking out a tab locks
out the
REC (Record) key on the Datassette. Should you decide, after
breaking
out
a write-protect tab,
that
you do want to record a program
on
that side
of
a tape, simply put a piece of tape over the write-protect opening.
DISK
DRIVES
The VIC
20
can use any
of
the Commodore disk drives, but the model
1540
disk drive (Figure
1-10)
has been designed to interface directly with the
VIC
20
through its serial port. The other drives must use a plug-in IEEE
interface cartridge
to
connect to the VIC
20.
Table
1-3
shows the specifica-
tions for the
1540
disk drive.
The
1540
disk drive can store 174,848 bytes
of
data
per diskette.
It
accomplishes this by putting more blocks
of
data
on the outer (longer)
tracks
of
the diskette than do other disk drives.
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