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@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
On Sun, Mar 27, 2016 at 10:11:02PM -0400, phiscock@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.
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