> 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.
The SFD was a 488 device, yes. But the 800K 1581 runs on the regular IEC,
just to prove that storage space is no object, and so do the 1GB+ CMD drives.
> 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_at_stockholm.ptloma.edu
-- People who buy computers from TV commercials *deserve* the Pentium. --------
Received on Thu Nov 16 2000 - 20:27:48 GMT