Strange behaviour with Drive 2 datasette

[Milli V]

One of my customers has an Adam with 2 data drives and he just discovered that if you try to boot up buck rogers in drive 2 it will never load - it just rewinds to the end and stops - I tested it and same behavior on mine - is there a reason for this?

 

And before you ask - the drives are fine and the tapes are good if in drive 1 . These are 2 different systems and 2 different tapes (2 different continents too )

 

Milli

[jblenkle]

Just tested mine and it also will not load from Drive 2. My guess is that the game was only written to load from Drive 1. I believe a lot of the early games and programs were like that.

 

 

One of my customers has an Adam with 2 data drives and he just discovered that if you try to boot up buck rogers in drive 2 it will never load - it just rewinds to the end and stops - I tested it and same behavior on mine - is there a reason for this?

 

And before you ask - the drives are fine and the tapes are good if in drive 1 . These are 2 different systems and 2 different tapes (2 different continents too )

 

Milli

[adamcon]

Just tested mine and it also will not load from Drive 2. My guess is that the game was only written to load from Drive 1. I believe a lot of the early games and programs were like that.

 

 

You got it!! Lots of Coleco's programs were written to got to ddd # 1 to boot, Don' t know who really knows, but logic would be disk 1, disk 2, ddd1, ddd 2. Maybe they were movin gso fast that the programmers didn't realize the ADAM could have more than 1 drive, who knows? Some programs will boot partially, then spin ddd # 1 looking for something; then bail on loading.

[NIAD]

There are a number of Coleco released titles that can only be loaded from Data Drive #1. Just another of those numerous errors made by Coleco employees due to the tremendous pressure they were under to get the system and software to market as quickly as possible.

 

IIRC the hacked/modified version of Buck Rogers - Super Game done by Walters Software that allows it to load from Disk Drive can be copied to data pack and loaded from either Data Drive #1 or #2.

 

Another example of this programming error is with SmartBasic v1.0... not the loading of the actual interpreter though as I will explain. The data pack of SB v1.0 that was included with each and every Adam system sold can be copied to a disk and loaded properly, but once loaded from disk, it is hardcoded to look for the HELLO turnkey program in Data Drive #1. Easy fix.

 

Another example is with SmartWriter. The programmers completely left out the ability to load from and save to Disk Drive #2 due to incomplete info provided by Coleco.

 

All of these and 100s of other tidbits like these are listed in the 100s of Adam Newsletters available in PDF format on Joe B's SacNews Adam website linked in the footer of my posts. BTW, do yourself a favor and download "The Adam Survival Guide" as well.