As I recall, most fast loading schemes reprogrammed the Commodore
serial interface chip (through which all the peripherals were
interfaced) to run faster, as well as usually providing some sort of
error correction. Commodore's serial interface design on the 64 was
among the worst features of the machine.
Before I got rid of my commodore 64 in 1990, I had an upgrade called a
burst rom chip for it. This let me use the faster commodore 128
accessories at their full rated speed rather than in 64 emulation mode.
This plus a 1581 3.5 inch floppy drive was like having a hard disk. :)
I do recall that this upgrade broke compatibility with the tape drive,
and I wonder if that wasn't the big reason all the interfacing was so
slow, to preserve compatibility with the tape system?
The speedup cartridges also probably downloaded software to the disk
drive's brain. Remember that Commodore put 6502s in their drives as
microcontrollers, with ram to hold their software, which was copied
from the ROMs at boot time. This allowed you to send
software that
would replace that image in RAM to the drive and configure it to do
pretty much what you wanted. Since the cartridge could now configure
both sides of the serial link, setting up faster communication was
easier.
The irony, of course, is that in this age of FireWire and USB, we're
starting to see the same kinds of peripherals - intelligent,
programmable, and the computer need not understand how to operate the
hardware directly. It would be amusing (though almost certainly not
profitable) to come up with specs of how the C64 might work today.
On Tuesday, January 7, 2003, at 04:31 PM, Bradley, Joel E -Syntegra US
wrote:
Ahhh....I have one of those c64's, original monitor, drive, tape, etc.
I
also have the "Mach 5" fastloader cartridge..I often wondered if it
was just
full of RAM? I did like the shortcuts that were built in which saves
on
typing.
I wonder..does anyone out there have a copy of the game "Airborne
Ranger"?
It was a superbly done game, and I remember how to play, but I have
lost the
manual. One problem is that the copy protection feature built-in was
that
you had to look up a medal ribbon that was located in the manual.
Without
that, it wouldn't let you play!
Joel
-----Original Message-----
From: ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk [mailto:ard@p850ug1.demon.co.uk]
Sent: Tuesday, January 07, 2003 4:33 PM
To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: Phonemark "Quick Data Drive" - info?, also WTD Commodore
15xx drive, info.
Hi all,
A while ago I bought a rather unusual C64/VIC20 add-on - a "Quick
Data
A lot of them turned up in the UK about 10 years ago -- the usual
surplus
places (Grenweld, and whatever J Bull called themselves at the time)
had
them. Nobody had the wafers (tapes) though...
Drive", presumably made by a company called
Phonemark. After thumbing
through the manual I found a few photos of the cartridges. From what
I can
gather, it's an early "stringy floppy" device that uses a cartridge
filled
I think it's much later than the Stringy Floppy.
IIRC, it connects between the cassette drive and the C64. I think QOS
was loaded at the same speed as a normal cassette load, and that QOS
was
similar in concept to the cassette 'turbo loaders' that were popular
with the C64.
-tony