Commodore 1541


Commodore 1541

(storage)The best known floppy disk drive for theCommodore 64. The 1541 was a single-sided 160 Kb drive butconverting to flippy disks would give another 160 Kb.

The disk drive used Group Code Recording and contained a6502 processor as a disk controller. Some people wrotecode for it to vibrate the head at different frequencies toplay tunes.

The transfer rate was about 300 bytes per second. The 1541used a bit-serial version of the IEEE 488 parallelprotocol. Some third-party speed-ups could transfer about 4kilobytes per second over the interface, and some "fastloaders" managed up to 10 kbps.

The Commodore 1570 was an upgraded 1541 for use with theCommodore 128.