4 ms·

The "oh look, this disk drive is actually a whole PC" aspect reminds me of the "Mr. Backup Z64" copier for Nintendo 64. It had a 386-class embedded PC running a

The "oh look, this disk drive is actually a whole PC" aspect reminds me of the "Mr. Backup Z64" copier for Nintendo 64. It had a 386-class embedded PC running a ROM-based DOS system to operate the internal Zip drive. Since the Zip drive sat on a standard ATA interface being driven by DOS, it could be replaced with a hard drive or CompactFlash slot. More loosely, it's also reminiscent of the Commodore disk drives that had their own 6502-class CPU and a software interface to upload code. Some developers used this to create "fast loaders" that bypass the slow stock communication routines.

boomlinde 8y ago
A fun bit of related trivia is that the 6502 in the Commodore 1541 disk drive is slightly faster than the 6510 in the PAL C64.
- tyingq 8y ago
  The 6502 in the later 1571 drive ran twice as fast as the C64's CPU.
- kazinator 8y ago
  The 1541 had a whole 6502 embedded system in it??? TIL. Yet it was so astonishingly slow, it was a laughing stock among junior high school kids. Total garbage compared to the Apple II drives designed by Woz, which were just dumb hardware, combined with a logic state sequencer" on the circuit card and registers for step motor control.
  - foone 8y ago
    The drive itself was actually very powerful and capable, it just was very limited by having to talk to the C64 using the Vic20-compatible interface, which had issues. That's why there were so many products for the c64 to fix it: Epyx Fast Load cartridges, for example. And plenty of games worked by having you first load a very simple file that just installed faster disk IO code and then used that code to load the rest of the game. That's basically what Disk II drives did on the Apple II, just for EVERY (bootable) DISK instead of only some of them: The first bootloader is encoded in a simplified method so that they can save firmware space, but the first bootloader is just better disk IO routines to load the rest of the disk.
  - boomlinde 8y ago
    Apparently they initially intended for it to have a fast parallel connection which would have meant a huge gain in speed, but they ended up with a serial bus on the C64 to be compatible with VIC-20 disk drives. This was supposed to be offset by hardware that could maintain a high serial speed, but the design ended up half broken, which they had to amend with the slow software routines before release. It sucks, but it's nice that the computer could patch the disk drive at run-time and have it run some more sophisticated software for a speed boost. For example, the Action Replay 6 comes with a "fast loader" that performs some 18 times better than the kernal loader and stock 1541 firmware on normal CBM formatted disks. Still not as quick as Woz' Disk II...
  - rasz 8y ago
    In 1983 C64 was $300, 1541 was $300, 180K Tandon TM100-1 PC floppy drive was $189. Why sell cheap floppy drive when you can sell one for the full price of your computer and double the profit? Commodore was manufacturing all mayor chips inside it after all ;-/ It got even worse when Commodore shat C128D out its engineering hole. 3 CPUs for the low low price of 3 CPUs, two doing nothing 99.999% of the time, all in all 85% of Amiga 500 price, 100% of Atari 520ST price, at 10% the power.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
derefr 8y ago
"This disk drive is actually a whole PC" was basically Nintendo's entire Unique Selling Proposition for a long while. Nintendo made consoles cheaply enough to make a profit, because they weren't designed to be powerful enough for the games that would be released at the end of the console's lifecycle, only the games that would be released near the beginning. But they managed to release games as if the console was more powerful anyway. It was basically because the cartridge was a black box, and could contain anything up-to-and-including its own replacement console. Early-in-lifecycle, game cartridges were just a board with plain ROM chips on it, containing instructions to run on the base hardware; but late-in-lifecycle cartridges included all sorts of other chips. (A game released late in the life of the SNES included a full ARM core, several times more powerful than the SNES's own CPU! Though it only used it to draw a few vector animations in a couple scenes of the game...) The Famicom Disk System and 64DD were "just" cartridges as well, from their host-console's perspective. And I don't mean that there was a complex dance where the FDS/64DD were running a DOS on the host-console's CPU that sent disk commands back to the drive; that logic was all internal to the drive itself, running on their on-board CPUs. It went even deeper than a memory-mapped IO port or an drive-command wire protocol; the console just didn't direct the drive at all. Rather, the firmware executing on the drive detected when the console would want new data, and DMAed in the required data itself, so that, from the console's perspective, the data was just "there" to see. (A bit like the NES's memory-mapper chips, but for full ROM banks rather than little word-sized windows.) The closest comparison I can think of to how those devices worked, would be to using one of those aux-to-tape adapters—from the tape reader's perspective, the right data is "just there" when it goes to read it, as if it was a regular tape. In this case, the right data was "just there" in response to bus reads of ROM parts of the memory-space on the cartridge port. These devices were, effectively, the original "flash carts." This design paradigm has culminated in some pretty ridiculous things embedded into a Nintendo cartridge, actually. There is a Nintendo DS flash cart that embeds a full GBA-compatible CPU core within it. Since it's in the wrong port to deliver GBA games directly to the DS's own GBA-compatible CPU core, it just "brings its own" CPU to emulate them on instead.
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  >There is a Nintendo DS flash cart that embeds a full GBA-compatible CPU core I can't find that much information but you're either talking about the Supercard or the CycloDS - both look like they were running emulators. Almost makes me want to find out if it's possible to put an ESP8266 in a cart.
Kadin 8y ago
Huh. I had no idea that existed! I was never clear on how people extracted ROM images from N64 cartridges, but that is pretty clever.
hcs 8y ago
Speaking of 6502, the Doctor V64 was another N64 copier, this time a 6502-based computer with a CD-ROM drive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_V64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_V64

boomlinde 8y ago

A fun bit of related trivia is that the 6502 in the Commodore 1541 disk drive is slightly faster than the 6510 in the PAL C64.

tyingq 8y ago
The 6502 in the later 1571 drive ran twice as fast as the C64's CPU.
kazinator 8y ago
The 1541 had a whole 6502 embedded system in it??? TIL. Yet it was so astonishingly slow, it was a laughing stock among junior high school kids. Total garbage compared to the Apple II drives designed by Woz, which were just dumb hardware, combined with a logic state sequencer" on the circuit card and registers for step motor control.
- foone 8y ago
  The drive itself was actually very powerful and capable, it just was very limited by having to talk to the C64 using the Vic20-compatible interface, which had issues. That's why there were so many products for the c64 to fix it: Epyx Fast Load cartridges, for example. And plenty of games worked by having you first load a very simple file that just installed faster disk IO code and then used that code to load the rest of the game. That's basically what Disk II drives did on the Apple II, just for EVERY (bootable) DISK instead of only some of them: The first bootloader is encoded in a simplified method so that they can save firmware space, but the first bootloader is just better disk IO routines to load the rest of the disk.
- boomlinde 8y ago
  Apparently they initially intended for it to have a fast parallel connection which would have meant a huge gain in speed, but they ended up with a serial bus on the C64 to be compatible with VIC-20 disk drives. This was supposed to be offset by hardware that could maintain a high serial speed, but the design ended up half broken, which they had to amend with the slow software routines before release. It sucks, but it's nice that the computer could patch the disk drive at run-time and have it run some more sophisticated software for a speed boost. For example, the Action Replay 6 comes with a "fast loader" that performs some 18 times better than the kernal loader and stock 1541 firmware on normal CBM formatted disks. Still not as quick as Woz' Disk II...
- rasz 8y ago
  In 1983 C64 was $300, 1541 was $300, 180K Tandon TM100-1 PC floppy drive was $189. Why sell cheap floppy drive when you can sell one for the full price of your computer and double the profit? Commodore was manufacturing all mayor chips inside it after all ;-/ It got even worse when Commodore shat C128D out its engineering hole. 3 CPUs for the low low price of 3 CPUs, two doing nothing 99.999% of the time, all in all 85% of Amiga 500 price, 100% of Atari 520ST price, at 10% the power.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

derefr 8y ago

"This disk drive is actually a whole PC" was basically Nintendo's entire Unique Selling Proposition for a long while. Nintendo made consoles cheaply enough to make a profit, because they weren't designed to be powerful enough for the games that would be released at the end of the console's lifecycle, only the games that would be released near the beginning. But they managed to release games as if the console was more powerful anyway. It was basically because the cartridge was a black box, and could contain anything up-to-and-including its own replacement console. Early-in-lifecycle, game cartridges were just a board with plain ROM chips on it, containing instructions to run on the base hardware; but late-in-lifecycle cartridges included all sorts of other chips. (A game released late in the life of the SNES included a full ARM core, several times more powerful than the SNES's own CPU! Though it only used it to draw a few vector animations in a couple scenes of the game...) The Famicom Disk System and 64DD were "just" cartridges as well, from their host-console's perspective. And I don't mean that there was a complex dance where the FDS/64DD were running a DOS on the host-console's CPU that sent disk commands back to the drive; that logic was all internal to the drive itself, running on their on-board CPUs. It went even deeper than a memory-mapped IO port or an drive-command wire protocol; the console just didn't direct the drive at all. Rather, the firmware executing on the drive detected when the console would want new data, and DMAed in the required data itself, so that, from the console's perspective, the data was just "there" to see. (A bit like the NES's memory-mapper chips, but for full ROM banks rather than little word-sized windows.) The closest comparison I can think of to how those devices worked, would be to using one of those aux-to-tape adapters—from the tape reader's perspective, the right data is "just there" when it goes to read it, as if it was a regular tape. In this case, the right data was "just there" in response to bus reads of ROM parts of the memory-space on the cartridge port. These devices were, effectively, the original "flash carts." This design paradigm has culminated in some pretty ridiculous things embedded into a Nintendo cartridge, actually. There is a Nintendo DS flash cart that embeds a full GBA-compatible CPU core within it. Since it's in the wrong port to deliver GBA games directly to the DS's own GBA-compatible CPU core, it just "brings its own" CPU to emulate them on instead.

voltagex_ 8y ago
>There is a Nintendo DS flash cart that embeds a full GBA-compatible CPU core I can't find that much information but you're either talking about the Supercard or the CycloDS - both look like they were running emulators. Almost makes me want to find out if it's possible to put an ESP8266 in a cart.

Kadin 8y ago

Huh. I had no idea that existed! I was never clear on how people extracted ROM images from N64 cartridges, but that is pretty clever.

hcs 8y ago

Speaking of 6502, the Doctor V64 was another N64 copier, this time a 6502-based computer with a CD-ROM drive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_V64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_V64