[GTALUG] One of the First Computer TV shows from the 80s.

[Ian Garmaise]

> I have seen alternate floppy interfaces for the C64 which loaded a LOT
> faster than the stock serial interface.  The drives were capable of much
> more than the serial interface they used.

When I was at Logo Computer Systems in Montreal,
we modified the firmware (you could upload new code at boot) of the floppy drive
to permit our application (Logo for C-64) to load much faster than it
normally would (still using the same serial interface).

Law of unintended consequences: it turned out that lots of schools
would actually share a floppy drive (they
were expensive) between multiple C-64's using some kind of cockamamie
network. Needless to say
our hack didn't work with it.  I was the contact person for the
schools and I heard about it frequently.
Killed the product.



On Sun, Mar 27, 2016 at 10:21 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 27, 2016 at 10:11:02PM -0400, phiscock at ee.ryerson.ca wrote:
>> Of the C64 floppy disk drive it was said 'Loads programs faster than you
>> can type them in...but only just.'
>>
>> Apparently there was some sort of handshaking bug that prevented the drive
>> from running at full speed, and so they crippled it with a delay loop
>> somewhere.
>
> I have seen alternate floppy interfaces for the C64 which loaded a LOT
> faster than the stock serial interface.  The drives were capable of much
> more than the serial interface they used.
>
> --
> Len Sorensen
> ---
> Talk Mailing List
> talk at gtalug.org
> https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk



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=====
Ian Garmaise
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