The Story of FCopy for the C-64
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 17th Jul 2011 12:01 UTC
Hardware, Embedded Systems "Back in the 80s, the Commodore C-64 had an intelligent floppy drive, the 1541, i.e. an external unit that had its own CPU and everything. The C-64 would send commands to the drive which in turn would then execute them on its own, reading files, and such, then send the data to the C-64, all over a propriatory serial cable. The manual for the 1541 mentioned, besides the commands for reading and writing files, that one would read and write to its internal memory space. Even more exciting was that one could download 6502 code into the drive's memory and have it executed there. This got me hooked and I wanted to play with that - execute code on the drive. Of course, there was no documention on what code could be executed there, and which functions it could use." Very interesting. I'm most interested in how he describes others taking his work, and making it better. This would be impossible today, thanks to Microsoft, Apple, and other patent trolls.
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RE[4]: Slow?
by zima on Sun 17th Jul 2011 22:09 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: Slow?"
zima
Member since:
2005-07-06

...as long as nobody breathed in the building and any heavy traffic outside was stopped, when a small Atari was loading a cassette ;)

Edited 2011-07-17 22:10 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[5]: Slow?
by JLF65 on Mon 18th Jul 2011 18:40 in reply to "RE[4]: Slow?"
JLF65 Member since:
2005-07-06

Actually, the Atari was VERY robust with their cassette. It used FSK for the data, and was immune to almost any problem. I could pound my A410 on a wall during loading and it wouldn't miss a bit. ;) The REALLY cool thing about the Atari cassette is they used a stereo cassette, where one channel carried data (in FSK format as mentioned), while the other channel was mixing with the computer audio. This allowed educational cassettes to talk to the user while loading data from the cassette.

Reply Parent Score: 3

RE[6]: Slow?
by zima on Tue 19th Jul 2011 02:26 in reply to "RE[5]: Slow?"
zima Member since:
2005-07-06

Hm, weird. It's not merely something what I remember, "do not breathe" is the stuff of legends :p (maybe largely due to how this was happening with cheap late small Atari models and their peripherals, the ones which were fairly standard in "lesser" markets at the time when few places were already basically waaay post-A500; it seems that such markets were possibly served even by sub-standard machines, judging from few snippets at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_8-bit_family#Tramiel_era:_XE_ser... )

And my buddy who had both (small Atari and c64, no case of "holy war" ;p ) seems to remember the c64 tapes as faster (though not being sure of it; plus, "turbo" cartridges and tapes were standard for c64 while I don't think it was the case with Atari). Floppy would be obviously faster than that.

Edited 2011-07-19 02:33 UTC

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