Subject: Cassette Media revisited

From: chris <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun May 18 02:23:21 2003

Well... audio tapes don't work as a substitute for a D/CAS cassette. At 
least not with my TEAC drive.

First attempt, drive takes the tape, but starts blinking the access light 
as soon as the drive is locked, never tries to do anything with it, 
software says "No Media".

After a quick 2nd look at the transport, I see a small finger sensor 
looking for that notch. 30 seconds later with my pocket knife, my audio 
tape has the notch.

2nd attempt, drive sees the tape, software reports "Busy" as the drive 
spins the tape to the end, clacks to the end and tries to spin some more, 
then gives up, rewinds a bit and stops. Software reports "Hardware Error".

My guess is, it is looking for some kind of end of tape marker. I tried 
both clear leader and leaderless tape, neither worked. I also tried a 
higher grade tape (Type II, 630 oersteds or whatever that word is). I 
don't know if the end of tape is a specific magnetic marker like a 
format, or what. Winding the tape to the end in a tape deck and putting 
back in the drive causes it to rewind the whole tape until it clacks at 
the end again. So it is definitly trying to rewind to the start of the 
tape and is simply never seeing that it is at the end.

It is possible that the drive is broken, but since it is seen by 
Retrospect on the Mac, and gives status updates as it goes, and the 
transport does its thing... I tend to think the drive is fine and I just 
can't use an audio tape.

So... does anyone know a supplier of these tapes? I haven't been able to 
turn up anyone that actually sells them anymore. A few people on this 
list offered to try to locate a spare tape for me for testing... but I'm 
not going to ask anyone to go thru that effort if I can't get a regular 
supply of tapes anyway.

The drive is a TEAC MT-2ST/N50. The following appear to be compatible 
tapes: MaynStream 20; Teac CT500 D/CAS; Verbatim ST500; Teac CT-600H; 
Verbatim ST600; Maxell CS-600HD; MaynStream 60; Teac CT-600N; Maxell 
CS-600XD; Verbatim ST600XD; MaynStream 150.

All in all, it probably isn't worth much more effort. Its only a 150 MB 
drive anyway. So for normal use, there isn't much I can do with it (at 
least not when I deal with the cost ratio of Zip disks or CD-R's).

-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>

---

From: Don Maslin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun May 18 02:23:39 2003

> least not with my TEAC drive.

<snip>

> CS-600XD; Verbatim ST600XD; MaynStream 150.

Chris, you wrote the magic words!  I have a box of ten of the
Maxell CS-600HD tapes that are unused.  Let me know what they are
worth to you (plus shipping) and they are probably yours.

						- don

---

From: "John Allain" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat May 31 20:07:00 2003

I don't know if Chris is available on weekends, 
so I'm asking it here:
How do you share resourses on AppleTalk?
I'm getting positive results, but still no remote
drives are visible.

The following was done on both connected systems:

  The serial/minidin ports were daisy-chained 
  with a cord (?SuperUSER?) supplied by Chris.

  Desktop
   +- Apple
       +- Control Panel
           +- Sharing Setup
                ('Start' was selected, reboot)
  Desktop
   +- File menu
       +- Sharing...
           +- Share this Disk
               (Done to the active drive)

Now, where is the remote drive
supposed to show up on the local system?

  Desktop
   +- Apple
       +- Control Panel
           +- File Sharing Monitor
               (nothing was shown)
  Desktop
   +- Apple
       +- Chooser
           +- Appletalk
               +- Servers
                   (none were shown)

Can I cross-connect two systems' drives 
or do things have to go master-slave?

John A.