Home Computer Peripherals - Commodore 64 Peripherals (Paperback)

Chapters: Commodore 64 Peripherals. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 95. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: This article is about the various external peripherals of the Commodore 64 home computer. Commodore Datasette 1530In the United States, the 1541 floppy disk drive was widespread. By contrast, in Europe the C64 was often used with cassette tape drives (Datasettes), which were much cheaper, but also much slower and less reliable than floppy drives. The datasette functioned similarly to a 300 baud modem, converting audio analog sounds into digital format. It plugged into a proprietary cassette port on the Commodore 64's motherboard. Standard blank audio cassettes could be used in this drive. The datasette's speed was very slow (about 300 baud). Loading a large program at normal speed could take up to thirty minutes in extreme cases. Many European software developers wrote their own fast tape loaders which replaced the internal KERNAL code in the C64 and offered loading times more comparable to disk drive speeds. Novaload was perhaps the most popular tape loader used by British and American software developers. Early versions of Novaload had the ability to play music while a program loaded into memory, and was easily recognisable by its black border and digital bleeping sounds on loading. Other fastloaders included loading screens, displaying computer artwork while the program loaded. More advanced fast loaders included minigames for the user to play while the program loaded from cassette. One such minigame fastloader was Invade-a-Load. In addition to low speeds, datasette users had to contend with interference from magnetic fields. Also, not too dissimilar to floppy drive users, the datasette's read head could become dirty or slip out of alignment. A small screwdriver could be us...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=340579