To try to fix the reliability problems with the drives, Commodore later switched the drive assembly manufacturing to a Mitsumi/Newtronics drive unit with a lever. The drives got so hot that people actually put them on the floor and used them as foot warmers during winter. This made the drive very heavy and it produced massive amounts of heat which was one of the causes for the high failure rates of the early drives. The 1540/1541 has its own 6502 processor, its own RAM and ROM along with all the other normal control chips needed for communicating with a computer.Īlso to lower costs, the 1540/1541 was powered by a step down transformer that lowered the 120V/240V mains AC voltage so it can then be rectified to DC voltage and passed through two linear voltage regulators to provide the 5V DC and 12V DC current needed to power the chips and the drive mechanism. This led to Commodore disk drives being basically a small computer unto itself. This meant that the normal electronics needed to communicate and manage disk drives was omitted in both the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64. Since Commodore didn’t think a lot of people would buy disk drives for what they were marketing as a low cost home computer, their design philosophy was to make the computers as simple and as cheap as possible. The 1541 had a notoriously high failure rate, mostly due to heat buildup inside the drive and the ALPS drive mechanism that had a tendency to go out of alignment and render the drive unusable. Unfortunately these clone drives and fast load software caused major compatibility issues with the copy protection used by many software manufacturers which meant that people who used certain copy protected software, still bought original 1541 drives instead of clones. ![]() It also created a business opportunity to create software to increase the speed of the 1541 drive, the most famous being the Epyx Fastload cartridge. ![]() A mistake that third party hardware manufactures were quick to exploit and it didn’t take long for faster compatible drives to come onto the market. The drive has two 6-pin DIN sockets in the back that connect to the serial bus and these sockets are connected in parallel to permit daisy chaining of up to a maximum of four drives as well as printers to the same serial bus.Īt the insistence of Commodore’s marketing department to make the 1541 compatible with the VIC-20, limitations were put into the 1541’s serial bus that made the 1541 the slowest disk drive on the market. The 1540/1541 is a serial bus single sided 5¼ inch floppy disk drive that formats disks to 170 kb of data split into 683 sectors on 35 tracks, each of the sectors holding 256 bytes using a proprietary disk operating system contained in the drives ROM. Later the VIC brand was removed from the model number and the drive was simply called the model 1541. The very early models still had a sticker on the back with the 1540’s FCC ID number but these white drives lasted only a few months and were quickly replaced with the same drive in a new beige case that matched the color of the C64 and a rainbow label. This drive had the same white case as the 1540 and the same front latch drive mechanism made by ALPS. The only difference was an updated ROM chip that made the drive compatible with the C64’s serial bus. This disk drive was basically a rebadged VIC-1540 drive that was sold with the VIC-20 computer. The first and most common disk drive to connect to the C64 was the venerable VIC-1541. Commodore later opened several drive manufacturing plants most notably in West Germany, Hong Kong and Taiwan but the large majority of disk drives were made in Japan. ![]() And while this turned out to be mostly true in Europe in the early years, Oh how wrong they were when it came to the North American market.ĭespite their expectations, demand for disk drives was well in excess of production and for the first year or so, drive shortages were very common since at the time the drives where only manufactured in Japan. After all, the C64 was marketed as the affordable home computer and disk drives at the time cost as much if not more than the computers themselves. When the Commodore 64 came on the market in 1982, Commodore thought that the cassette drive marketed as the datasette would be more than sufficient as a storage medium. ![]() Commodore 64 Disk Drives Explained for Newbies
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