R.I.P: Commodore disk drive related items

Track 0 light barrier support of the Commodore 1541C drive

When preparing the SpeedDOS ROM collection for a detailed test session of Nicolas Welte's 6502-RAMROM, the DOS ROMs for the C1541II drive were used as basis for the floppy speeder replacement ROMs. I asked myself, if the C1541II ROM does also contain ROM code to handle the track 0 light barrier of the 1541C series drives. The following text provides a deep analysis of the ROM differencies to clarify this question.

• 1541C-to-1541II-diff-03.txt (2003-06-06, 11kB)

Using the Burstmode of the C1571 and C1581 drives with the C64

In a newsgroup discussion there was a little talk about the possible advantages, if a C1571 is connected to a C64. A book from Rainer Ellinger, »COMMODORE 1571 &1570; Das große Floppybuch«, was mentioned, that presented a hardware modification and a kernal patch to utilize the Burstmode on a C64 at the pages 188ff. In the german magazine »64'er«, issue 09/1986 at pages 50ff another such a Burstmode Kernal was described with a slightly different hardware modification (using CIA2 instead of CIA1). Pasi Ojala developed a Burstmode Fastloader for the C64, presented in the C=Hacking Magazine Issue 19. Unfortunately he didn't create a Kernal ROM replacement yet.

• Floppy1571-Burstmode.pdf (2003-03-09, 374kB)

  Lowres scan of pages 188 to 193 from Rainer Ellingers book about the C1570/71 disk drives.

  
  
• C64-Burstload-Kernal-05.txt (2003-03-09, 14kB)

  Converted eText from the book above, 5th proof read edition with annotations.

  
  
• FSD-System_ASM-Source.txt (2003-03-09, 26kB)

  Converted text from the ASM source listing of the »64'er« FSD-System.

  
  
• C64-Burstmode-Kernals.zip (2003-03-09, 28kB)

  ZIPped D64 image file with C64 Burstmode files and readily prepared Kernal ROMs

  
  
• Burst Fastloader for C64

  Pasi Ojala's web page about a Burstmode Fastloader for the C64 which may be updated from time to time.

  
  
• 64'er 5/89 BDOS

  This article (german) describes a powerful transfer system for the C64 and C128 from Andre Fachat. It describes some Userport hardware to rebuild the additional Burstmode circuits of the C128 (bidirectional transceivers) for the C64. One of the download links contains a picture with the schematic.