randy@ranhome.UUCP (Randys Account) (11/24/85)
A short while ago, someone asked about the address of Eastern House, the manufacturers of the Rabbit cartridge for the VIC. That address will appear at the end of this posting. This is a product review of the Rabbit cartridge for the C64. I have not used the VIC version, and so cannot comment on it. The Rabbit is a cartridge for the C64 which offers faster tape operation. It will load and save files much faster than the standard cassette. The examples that E.H. give are for loading an 8k file. The times are 3 min. for standard tape, 30 seconds for tape with the Rabbit, and 22 seconds with the 1541. It also includes a machine language monitor, and commands for converting values from hex to decimal, and vice versa. the Rabbit stores data on tape in a special format, so you must convert your existing tape files to rabbit format before you can speed load them. It has a copy command to do this for you. The copy command will also copy many commercial tape programs into Rabbit format. Once your files are converted, they really do load at amazing speeds. The copy command has some problems with protected and multi part load commercial programs. With a little experimentation, most commercial programs can be made to work. The Rabbit also has two data file types, which I didn't try very much. They seem to work pretty much as advertised. The machine language monitor seems to be pretty similar to supermon or micromon. It can be handy, especially if you need a ml monitor which cannot be overwritten by software. To use the Rabbit, you plug it into the cartridge port. After powerup, you need to issue a sys command to "turn it on". It takes away 8k from the top of your basic memory. You lose this memory whenever you have the Rabbit plugged in, whether it is acitvated or not. Once it is activated, you can load and save in either standard format or Rabbit format. To load in Rabbit format, you type *L "filename". There are two ways to save a file with the Rabbit. You can choose to save it with a long header or with a short header. I allways used the short header format, with no problems. The verify command works differently from the standard C64 one. The Rabbit verify just tests to see if the file can be read without errors. It does not compare the file to the program in memory. The Rabbit also has a command to append a program from tape to a program in memory. This command will not renumber the program being appended however. In summary, this is a product that not only works, it does everything claimed and does it well. At the time that I bought it, I had no disk drive, and this product was a great help to me. I was entirely satisfied, and would not hesitate to reccomend this product to others. The Rabbit is available directly from Eastern House, but you can sometimes find it cheaper at a mail order house. I am not associated with Eastern House in any way, except as a happy customer. Eastern House 3239 Linda Dr. Winston Salem NC 27106 (919)924-2889 (919)748-8446