VIC 1540 v VIC 1541

[robert_sissco]

The 1541 arrived today, power on test behaved properly, hooked it up to my VIC-20 and I could read and write to a disk without issue.

Did my usual drive work (removed the upper FR shield, added heat sinks to the 6502, 6522's and the one ROM I am keeping, cleaned and lucubrated the read head, added new rubber feet to the bottom, and watched the entire case).

I should be good to go once I get the ROM and labels in.

 

[robert_sissco]

So, I got everything in, swapped the ROM chips, changed the labels, and it is working great.



However my wife is convinced I have a super power, when I make something I can't find, I will be able to get the real deal not long after I make it.

For example there is a bakery that makes cookies she loves. They usually come to the farmers market, but this year they had not attended the first few so I made her cookies, and that very weekend they were back.

It was how I got my 1581 (I made a clone from DIY Chirs, and then a few weeks later I got a good deal on a working one).

Well, less that a week after I converted the 1541 to a 1540...

 

[czunit]

So now you can do disk to disk copies without the CPU having to worry about it. Next up write a program to allow the 1540 to send file data to the printer.....

 

[tech58761]

On the topic of fastloaders, the C64 game Spindizzy has one built in - if you reset the 64 but not the 1541, the code would remain in the drive's memory and be available to use for fastloading other software.

I did want to document / dump the code, but one, I never got around to it, and two, I didn't really need it after cracking the protection so I could more easily back up the game.

It was several sectors on the disk called via B-E commands and a bit of code that resided in RAM (anyone who has a copy, look at the files "Copyright", "1985", and "Loader. BIN").