1541
Being born in the UK in 1981, my articles about home computers are biased towards that time and place. This is due to both my own personal experience, and also a conscious attempt to provide an alternative UK bias to the predominant US bias amongst English-speaking people my age reminiscing about home computers.
1541 tech specs
1541 (Photo: Evan Amos)
The 1541 was a 5¼″ floppy disk drive made by Commodore. It's compatible with the VIC 20 and C64,[1] although its brown colour scheme complements the latter.
It can format a disk side to 664 blocks (166 KB). Throwing caution to the wind, with the careful use of scissors, you can notch out a write-enabling hole on the second side. You can then write to it by turning the disk over, just as with a cassette tape.
Bear in mind that a typically sized single loader game seems to compress down to about 90 blocks (22.5 KB). This means you could comfortably fit about seven such games on a single disk side... or one mammoth multiloader.[2]
Rather impressively for such a downmarket system, the 1541 drive contains its own microprocessor, ROM, and RAM, making it effectively another microcomputer in its own right. This makes it less like a passive limb that the computer controls, and more like a co-worker it talks to. The upshot of this is that the host computer is free to focus its resources, both memory and processing power, on other tasks.[1][3]
Alas, it had a hefty price tag, usually costing about as much as the computer itself. In the UK, it was a rare C64 owner indeed who had a floppy disk drive. Most people simply had the 1530 tape drive it came with. But if you did have a disk drive, it was almost definitely a 1541. Whenever software was sold on disk, it was a given that it was 1541-compatible.
On a personal note, I managed to get one of these in the 1990s, with the earlier Alps spring-eject mechanism, no less. In spite of its notoriety, and its propensity to repeatedly bash its head against the wall, it nevertheless served me flawlessly. As I bought it secondhand about a decade after it was made, that might well have been an example of survivorship bias.
1541-II
1541-II tech specs
Commodore later released the 1541-II. Besides being C64C beige, it also moved the heat-producing electronics to a separate block closer to the mains socket. This made it more compact, and apparently more stable to boot. It looks like a slightly smaller 1571 drive.
Datel Electronics of Action Replay fame could often be found advertising it in Zzap!64, complete with a disk version of the Night Moves / Mind Benders bundle.[4] This would have surely made multiloaders Nightbreed and Sly Spy: Secret Agent much more playable.
References
- "1541 manual" Commodore, 1982, pp. 1—3
- Note: Looking at One Load V5's "Crunched" directory as a whole, it contains 48,970,527 bytes across 2,145 files. 48,970,527 ÷ 2,145 ≈ 22,830 bytes per file. 22,830 ÷ 1,024 ≈ 22.3 KB each, rounding up to 90 blocks. I think we can safely say that single loader games average about 90 blocks (90 blocks × 256 bytes per block = 22.5 KB) each. As a typical example, at 21,633 bytes or 85 blocks, you could fit seven copies of Spore on a single 1541-formatted disk side. As a less typical example, at 9,146 bytes or 36 blocks, you could fit eighteen copies of Zolyx. In comparison, a 1581-formatted disk could fit a whopping thirty-five typically sized games!
- "1541-II manual" Commodore, 1986, p. 1-4
- "Datel Electronics" Datel Electronics (Vendor), Zzap!64, Feb 1991, pp. 60—61
Downloads
Documentation
- "1541 manual" Commodore, 1982
- "1541-II manual" Commodore, 1986
Commodore 64: 1530 | 1541 | 1581 | Pro-16
