This is a Commodore 1541 5.25" floppy disk drive. It functions as a computer in its own right, with its own 8-bit CPU, ROM, and operating system (CBM DOS). It is its own computer with its own operating system. The Commodore 64 or 128 or Vic 20 or whatever... would talk to it over a serial cable and send commands to the onboard computer. These drives were so robust and overbuilt.show more

It was also great because you could start loading a game, go get lunch, and come back just when it was about to finish.

Here's a 1541 inspired joystick (no actual 1541's were harmed) that I made a few years ago for a retro-computing event.

I remember my mom ran an accounting program on the C64. She would start downloading the program and then go start the coffee machine. When the coffee was ready, so was the download.

Never could afford one as a kid. Always jealous of those who had the money. I remember mowing lawns all summer just to purchase a cassette tape drive for storage. I was so excited. So much nicer than typing every program in manually each time.

They are slow and unreliable. The apple Ii had the drive game mastered. Their disk system was rock solid. The c64 ones constantly need restarting flashing lights etc. Way over engineered as an afterthought imo.

I don't recognize the toggle switch on the right side of the drive? Were there model variations or is that a mod?

Reminds me of those old music videos by MrSolidSnake745 😁

To bad they demollished the brand

...and with an hardware hack both on 1541 Ave C64 you could connect it thru parallel port and have much faster load times. Good old Speeddos 😍

These early models definitely weren't robust and lost alignment often. As soon as you get to track 35 the SNR drops to 30% and tracks 36-40 are non-existent to this drive which created the 35 track limitation. This carried onto the 1541-II even though it can read all 40 tracks.

I came up with my own copy protection back in the day that relied on tracks that were out of bounds on the high side. It didn't bang the heads to read it. The best commercial disk copier that I had (Diskmaker) wasn't able to duplicate it because the extra data looked like noise (which it was). Why did I create this copy protection? To keep my buddies from sharing my games with people I didn't want them shared with... if they did share the games the copy would display the offender's name and lock up. SYS 64739. Locks things up nicely.

there was never a power switch in the front of any version of any manufactured 1541. the back switch must have failed. that front switch is a repair or a mod.

Just seeing this disk drive gives me warm andfuzzies. Memories of being a 4th grader in 1984, writing choose your own adventure programs in Commodore BASIC and creating art in Little Logo.

Atari drives were similarly overbuilt (well, so was most of the Atari 400/800 system I had as a kid). Meanwhile the Apple 2 floppy drive system was the work of a genius. Super fast, more disk space. Oh yeah, that's right - Woz came up with it :)

some games on the C64 (e.g. Ultima) uploaded custom code into the 1541 drive and used the drive CPU for disk-handling tasks.

ho yea , there was a joke about it reading the disk and converting it to the dame audio tones used by the tape system and passing it to the c64 as audio for it to load beeing the reason for its apparant slow speed

So overbuilt it lacked a track zero sensor? The answer to which was to slam the drive head into the bump stops ~40 times, resulting in a machine-gun like clatter when formatting a disk?

And you could actually play music with it! ;-)

its a shame due to a coding issue is why they're slow, hence why fastboot carts etc became a norm

Error based copy protection quickly beat them out of alignment. Pop off the bottom, readjust the stepper motor, and you're back at it. The first time was rough-ish, but after a few times it just became a thing. That's what lead me to learn machine code. To clean up the disks.

It was also the slowest disk drive of any 8-bit computer. Made me thankful for my Amstrad CPC.

They tend to have a capacitor problem, but it was an easy fix. I used to repair these in the back room of the local computer shop.

@TheyCallMeTomO1 I learned programming on a commodore 64... Ah the memories. Lol

I saved my money from mowing lawns to buy one of those

I recall on Astrosyn'97 copy party guys showing shaded cube on C64 Demo, they were using 1541 to calculate the cube shading parameters ;)

Still have one somewhere in storage

Not to mention that you could place your grilled cheese sandwich on top of it and it's warmth would keep your sandwich nice and melty. 😉

this was the ticket to playing Ultima III or IV

Great memories. I have used both.

Yeah, until you throw the head up against the backstop while reading errors and knocks itself out of alignment. Because it was a smart drive, software developers would encode specific errors on the disk then write a subroutine to check for the disk error as copy protection.

You could actually reprogram it to: A) Write bad sectors to copy copy-protected disks. B) Play music by chattering the drive head 🤣

Why all the past tense? I still use mine all the time. 🤔

One in my loft and also a MK II.

My young dream, needed it for play at Flight Simulator 🙄

So slow on occasion it was quicker to load from cassette