On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 09:43:15AM -0400, Ian Garmaise wrote:
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.
Yes my highschool had such a setup. If you knew the right commands you could load the same program on all the machines in parallel which saved time. Also allowed sharing one printer of course. -- Len Sorensen