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: Painful memories...
by Laurence on Mon 18th Jul 2011 12:42 UTC in reply to "Painful memories..."
Laurence
Member since:
2007-03-26

We had a C64, but my father never saw a reason to get a floppy or tape drive. So all of my programs were written on paper, and had to be retyped after each reboot. It was cool at first, but having to re type everything caused me to lose interest after a while and just use it with the game cartridges.

Sort of sucks looking back on all the fun I could have had with the disk drive.

A floppy drive I could understand (I started out on an Amstrad CPC646 with no floppy drive), but no cassette drive either!?

That's a little like buying a car and being told the petrol tank is optional.

Reply Parent Score: 3

RE[2]: Painful memories...
by leech on Mon 18th Jul 2011 13:04 in reply to "RE: Painful memories..."
leech Member since:
2006-01-10

I was incredibly happy when my parents one day came home with an Atari 800XL and an Atari 1050 Floppy Drive, we eventually managed to get one of those Happy Chips, now that was awesome!

The Happy Drive changed the beep-beep beep...beep. Into Beeepbeepbeep. Well okay, hard to describe the sounds, but it actually played sound through the monitor as it loaded. I also recall it making some weird farting noises as it'd load up specifically BASIC games.

A friend of mine had a C-64 and it was horrible, even with the fastloader cartridge he had, he'd start loading up a game from floppy, go upstairs, make a sandwich, come back down stairs, and watch a movie, then it'd finally load.

Go figure that due to the 8-bit era, I ended up getting an Atari ST, and he ended up getting an Amiga. Even though the makers of each switched teams and I ended up getting the real descendant of the C64, and he got the one from the Atari 8-bits.

Jay Miner R.I.P.

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[3]: Painful memories...
by JLF65 on Mon 18th Jul 2011 18:45 in reply to "RE[2]: Painful memories..."
JLF65 Member since:
2005-07-06

I had an Atari 400 with 32KB and a cassette, then got the Percom floppy drive, then a Mosaic 64KB expansion, then the B-Key full stroke keyboard. That served me well for years before I replaced it with an Amiga 500, which served me well for many years again. ;)

Reply Parent Score: 2

Bill Shooter of Bul Member since:
2006-07-14

If you had previously spent your life buying horse driven carriages, you wouldn't find the lack of a petrol tank that suspicious on a new fangled horse cart.

Reply Parent Score: 4

RE[3]: Painful memories...
by Laurence on Mon 18th Jul 2011 15:26 in reply to "RE[2]: Painful memories..."
Laurence Member since:
2007-03-26

If you had previously spent your life buying horse driven carriages, you wouldn't find the lack of a petrol tank that suspicious on a new fangled horse cart.

hehehe good point and well put

Reply Parent Score: 2