The Commodore 1541 disk drive was originally priced at $399 in 1982 (~$1,300 in today’s money)
To teletype interface with the pair of 1541 serial connectors, an adaptor / dongle was required. Dave brewed up a USB to RS232 to TTL dongle. The finished MacBook USB to 1541 serial adaptor looks a bit messy, but did the job.
Next up, Dave communicated with the 1541, with its freshly baked KIM-1 ROMs, and dongle, via a Minicom terminal on his Mac. His hand typed assembly Hello World code worked first time (as far as we saw in the video).
(Image credit: Commodore History channel on YouTube ) (Image credit: Commodore History channel on YouTube ) (Image credit: Commodore History channel on YouTube ) (Image credit: Commodore History channel on YouTube ) (Image credit: Commodore History channel on YouTube ) (Image credit: Commodore History channel on YouTube ) Before signing off, Dave wanted to get a bit nearer to making the 1541 into a VIC-20 by adding a BASIC interpreter . He ported Tiny Basic to the KIM-1 and burned it to a ROM to insert on the 1541's PCB. Again, this worked, making it much quicker to code a Hello World program.
The TechTuber made it clear that this 1541 ‘general purpose computer’ remained very limited without major hardware mods due to its lack of I/O – limiting it to serial terminal use. But we don’t blame him for not wanting to mess with this precious retro hardware too much.
This project makes us wonder about the general purpose computing abilities of modern drive controller electronics.
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Mark Tyson Social Links Navigation News Editor Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
snemarch Iirc there was software (can't remember if any commercial games did it, or only demos) back in the day that would offload computation to the 1541 drive, but can't remember any specific titles right now. But I did stumble upon Freespin from 2021, which is kinda crazy – it bit-bangs video and sound output 🤯 Reply
Jason Ka I recall that that there was a cartridge for the Commodore 64 that At Least doubled the load speed from the disk drive called “Mach 5”. I am wondering how it worked. Would that have had an effect on using the hard drive as it own computer? Reply
Fruitmaniac Yup. The C64 didn't have room for a disk controller so they put everything in the drive. Reply
blppt Jason Ka said: I recall that that there was a cartridge for the Commodore 64 that At Least doubled the load speed from the disk drive called “Mach 5”. I am wondering how it worked. Would that have had an effect on using the hard drive as it own computer? The 1541 was a buggy mess to the point where it defaulted to something ridiculous like 300 BYTES/sec transfer rates, though the mechanism was capable of much higher. Epyx's Fast Load Cartridge was the popular fix for it—basically all it did was enable the 1541 to transfer at the rate it was originally supposed to. Reply
BFG-9000 The $400 1541 was initially so unreliable that a host of 3rd party clone external floppy drives from many manufacturers popped up, usually selling for around half that price, and I had one (still have it, and it did not turn out to be as completely compatible as they claimed). All of those also used the $25 6502 because the closest equivalent from Intel in their 8080 was $370 for the chip alone. The low price was why it or a variant was used in many 8-bit computers through the 1970s and 80s from Acorn, Apple, Atari, and Commodore Reply
Tanakoi Jason Ka said: I recall that that there was a cartridge for the Commodore 64 that At Least doubled the load speed from the disk drive called “Mach 5”. I am wondering how it worked. Would that have had an effect on using the hard drive as it own computer? The original C64 didn't come with a hard drive, and even the floppy drive was an aftermarket purchase. I can't recall its name, but there was one program that made the rounds back then which purported to raise the floppy drive's speed, but would literally make the drive catch fire if run. Reply
Sluggotg Jason Ka said: I recall that that there was a cartridge for the Commodore 64 that At Least doubled the load speed from the disk drive called “Mach 5”. I am wondering how it worked. Would that have had an effect on using the hard drive as it own computer? The 1541 drive had a serious bug that reduced data transfer speed to one Tenth of its design. Several Cartridges fixed that, including the most popular, the Epyx Fastload Cartridge, (as previously pointed out by BLPPT). You could also use a software based solution. The Famous "Fast Hackem" series of tools came with a small program you could run off a disk that would give you the same very fast loading. Unfortunately many forms of copy protection would not let you use these. The reason these programs/carts were able to fix the Design Error was because the 1541 is a computer too. There are some excellent videos on Youtube about they used the power of the 1541 to get around the design error. Here is one: pUjOLLvnhjE View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUjOLLvnhjE Reply
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