4 ms·

This is really funny because that drive was so incredibly slow, and especially the 1540 was unreliable. A tape with fastloader would approximate the speed of th

by Luc 8y ago

This is really funny because that drive was so incredibly slow, and especially the 1540 was unreliable. A tape with fastloader would approximate the speed of the stock drive... Still, I did the same thing!

radicalbyte 8y ago
Well we eventually got the fast-loading cartridges which turned the 1541 into a speed beast.
- weinzierl 8y ago
  Floppy disks where also much more convenient to handle. If you had more than one program on your cassette you had to wind the cassette to the right spot manually. This was not to unusual, a typical 60 minutes cassette could hold about 100 KiB per side, enough room for two or three simple games.
melling 8y ago
There were fastloaders for the 1540 too that boosted them 5-20x. https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Fast_loader https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Fast_loader
- kleiba 8y ago
  Fun fact: one of the popular fast loaders for the 1541, called "Hypra Load", was co-written by an 18-year old guy who later became one of Germany's game magazine pioneers, was the translator of LucasArt's adventure games to German, only to shift jobs once again in the 1990's when he became the product manager responsible the full Xbox product catalog at Microsoft.
pkaye 8y ago
The interface chip they were working with had a bug on a hardware shift register and the designer were not able to switch because management wanted it to be compatible with the VIC 20. So they implemented a software solution which was 5x slower that with hardware.
- gnat 8y ago
  +1. Interested readers should check out the very good book "Commodore: A Company on the Edge" by Brian Bagnall for this and other fascinating stories from how the PET, VIC-20, and C64 came to be. (And parallels to Internet-age companies are a fun exercise for the reader)
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
My C64 shipped with a fastloader disk. You had to load and run the fastloader every time you restarted the computer, mind, but at least it was smaller than most of the programs you wanted to fastload.

by Luc 8y ago

radicalbyte 8y ago

Well we eventually got the fast-loading cartridges which turned the 1541 into a speed beast.

weinzierl 8y ago
Floppy disks where also much more convenient to handle. If you had more than one program on your cassette you had to wind the cassette to the right spot manually. This was not to unusual, a typical 60 minutes cassette could hold about 100 KiB per side, enough room for two or three simple games.

melling 8y ago

There were fastloaders for the 1540 too that boosted them 5-20x. https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Fast_loader https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Fast_loader

kleiba 8y ago
Fun fact: one of the popular fast loaders for the 1541, called "Hypra Load", was co-written by an 18-year old guy who later became one of Germany's game magazine pioneers, was the translator of LucasArt's adventure games to German, only to shift jobs once again in the 1990's when he became the product manager responsible the full Xbox product catalog at Microsoft.

pkaye 8y ago

The interface chip they were working with had a bug on a hardware shift register and the designer were not able to switch because management wanted it to be compatible with the VIC 20. So they implemented a software solution which was 5x slower that with hardware.

gnat 8y ago
+1. Interested readers should check out the very good book "Commodore: A Company on the Edge" by Brian Bagnall for this and other fascinating stories from how the PET, VIC-20, and C64 came to be. (And parallels to Internet-age companies are a fun exercise for the reader)

PhasmaFelis 8y ago

My C64 shipped with a fastloader disk. You had to load and run the fastloader every time you restarted the computer, mind, but at least it was smaller than most of the programs you wanted to fastload.