The Singing 1541 Floppy Drive

I remember this program for the C64, I think it was called Magic Disk or something. It always made me wonder if it was killing my disk drive or not.

@zippydebrain

That, and you have to be weary of the condition of the drive.

It's bad enough that prices are going up, but it's really bad to spend good money on a bad drive with no good source of parts to repair it.

They are still around in pawn shops and flea markets and maybe the odd garage sale but careful, they are going back UP in price again.

I looked it up, the 6510 allows or page switching, which is what allowed the C64 to have ROMS and RAM in the same memory space (with the video under the basic rom for example) as a way of getting more than 64K effectively.

I knew that Commodore made a small change to the 6502 that it never bothered to share with anyone else, couldn't remember what it was and didn't want to get into a big history lesson.

I said dumbed down as a comparative statement, not that anyone dumbed it down...

@zippydebrain

Yes, the 6510 is the CPU in the C64.

However, the 6502 isn't "dumbed down." If anything, the 6510 is an enhanced 6502.

An example of a dumbed down 6502 CPU would be the 6507 used in the Atari 2600.

Yes but not the same as the one found in the C64, though the differences, which I forget now, were not huge. It was the 6510 as I recall.

Yes the drive doesn't automatically do anything, the program is put in the buffer and then told to execute it from the C64 after which the drive does the work itself. The program would not need to be in C64 memory since (as I recall its been a while) you can load a block into one of the buffers directly.

@zippydebrain

The CPU in the 1541 wasn't "dumbed down" but was a full 6502; virtually the same as what you'd find in a VIC-20 or the Apple II.

@zippydebrain

"What people may not notice is that it is the drive itself doing it, not the computer."

More precisely, the program was likely loaded from the floppy in the drive into the C64's RAM, then when the software is running, the user tells the C64 to program parameters into the drive's RAM for the drive's own computer to execute.

The 1541 uses the MOS 6502 CPU and can execute programming stored in its own RAM independent of the host computer (the C64 with its MOS 6510).

To clarify before I get a response I mean the program to do that was in the 4K of ram in the 1541 drive which had a dumbed down CPU of its own.

I used to have a copy program you could put in, connect 2 drives to each other (and not to a computer) and every time you switched disks it would make a copy from one drive to the other.

It was hilarious...if slightly pointless.

Or back in alignment if it was out of alignment. :P That was what the purpose of slamming the head to the end any time it had a misread was all about...didn't always work mind you.
But yes it couldn't have been good for the drive. I have all that around somewhere. What people may not notice is that it is the drive itself doing it, not the computer.