16 Nov
2000
16 Nov
'00
8:27 p.m.
Maybe I did get that from some 80's propoganda.
Sorry. The drive was
still Godaweful slow. Not because it is serial either. There was
something badly wrong with thier design.
Admittedly, the 1541 was fairly flawed in a lot of ways. The 1571 was
much, much better, and the v3.1 1571 I think is a fabulous drive.
MFM and GCR compatibility, fast serial, true double-sided. Nice stuff.
To get high
speed, high capacity drives for the C-64, you just added a
commonly available IEEE-488 interface. This gives you a fast parallel
interface for using a myriad of faster and far higher capacity drives.
SFD1001 and 8050 come to mind right off.
That was the 1mb floppy right? I didn't know that ran on a different buss. Not by magic. By machine language calls to the
drive's rom. This is not
a complete dos, but a kernel you can make calls to. Imagine CP/M. Then
subtract the command interpreter. Sure, all the calls are there but it's
vastly more difficult to use.... If you go ahead and write a ccp you lose
compatability because of the ram it takes up. I don't know if there is a
cartridge-based DOS for the C=. Spartados X is a 64k cart that bitbangs
the ram/rom to avoid bumping memlo.
It's not really machine calls, though you can do it. It's more like a simple
shell. FastLoad provides you a > command, and something like
s0:x
scratches file X. If you want to call a machine code routine, you can do
that, but the interface isn't quite that blunt.
This is all part of the Commodore philosophy to offload everything to
the peripheral.
See, when a Commodore freak hears DOS, we think the drive's internal software,
not a menu or an interface. The DOS wedge which most fastloaders and
utility cartridges implement, or a clone thereof, is just an interface to
it and the simple command "shell" set it understands. There are higher
level menus but I'm not really fond of any of them.
--
----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu
-- People who buy computers from TV commercials *deserve* the Pentium. --------