The Singing 1541 Floppy Drive

The Commodore 64's 1541 floppy drive playing music. Probably one of the most unusual things this computer could do. More odd stuff on my blog: http://classicalgasemissions.blogspot.com/

Category:

Music

Tags:

• commodore
• 64
• c-64
• c64
• floppy
• music
• 1541
• drive

[startreking2007]

Now if it could sing "still alive"

[donstratton]

@dsbiehl Unless you were loading off a datasette, in which case you had time to defrost and cook a turkey. ;)

[wolfeedarkfang]

If this was able to be done on a apple iie it would probably cause brown noise lol.

[SpearM3064]

@xxxogchris In fact, the 5.25" disks used by the 1541 only stored about 170 KB. (The Atari 800, which used the same disks, could only store about 130 KB; the Apple II could only store about 140 KB.) The 3.5" disk used by the 1581 could store about 800 KB. There are companies like Athana that still make new 5.25" (and even the older 8" disks), so they're not as hard to find as you might think.

[SpearM3064]

@jxhensley The 1541 was originally intended to be about 5 times faster, in fact, thanks to a hardware shift register, but a hardware bug in the chip forced them to handle the entire shift in software. The fact that the 1541 had its own RAM is what made cartridges like FastLoad possible. (Original speed was about 300 bytes per second; with FastLoad, about 4000 bytes per second.)

[SpearM3064]

@CheapBeer09 The 1541 disk drive was *far* more common in the United States than it was overseas. I've got two that are still in working order (and two working C64's), and needless to say, I am VERY careful with them.

[SpearM3064]

@ueberRegenbogen If you weren't afraid to modify your hardware, you could even add *more* memory to the disk drive.  (It only came with 2 kilobytes of RAM, and half of that was used for disk buffers.)

[SpearM3064]

@vapourmile Well... not DIRECTLY through the OS. C64 BASIC 2.0 lacked the disk commands that PET BASIC did. You could still open a channel to the drive and send commands to it that way. One of my favorite programs was FastCopy. If you had two 1541 disk drives, all you had to do was configure the drives and then you could disconnect the C64, and the drives could be used to copy unprotected floppies. Great for making backups of all those programs you typed out of magazines. :)

[dsbiehl]

@blade004 Oh yes, how can I forget the tape. "Press Play on Tape" will forever be burned into my psyche as well as loader music. I had the tape experience for only a short time after getting my C64. Took me a few months to realize that the floppy drive was indeed a good investment..

[blade004]

@TimSDobson Mind you, it was always a bitch when someone used the fucking kettle or flicked a particular light switch in the house resulting in the modem disconnecting :(

[blade004]

@TimSDobson The BBS days were brilliant, ran one on an Amiga 2000 with a mate of mine, very special days :)

[blade004]

@dsbiehl Oh yes, it certainly was great and a hell of a lot better than not just making a snack and a drink but a 3 course dinner when loading from Cassette Tape.. lol :) I didn't mind the load times from Tape though, there was always nice loader music and the games were brilliant :), but of course, disk was always better :)