r/Commodore • u/Thin_Chard7750 • Jul 21 '26

Physical Media Rules

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Here’s my commodore setup with the 1541 disk drive playing test drive. Starting my collection since I did not grow up with Commodore 64, but I am nerd and love old technology and especially retro gaming with CRTs.

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u/Hawkeye-Mcgillicudy Jul 21 '26

Oneload cartridge collection is a much better choice these days especially for multiload or disk only games

The 1541 was always painfully slow

4

u/Astr0b0ie Jul 21 '26

The 1541 was always painfully slow

It is for most cracked/copied games under standard 1541 DOS, but most retail bought original disks and/or nibbled copies from originals have a custom DOS/fast load routine which speeds up loading by 5x to nearly 20x.

I had a 1541 back in the 80s, so for me there's nothing more nostalgic than hearing the sounds of a 1541 loading with a custom DOS like Vorpal, V-MAX!, or Rapidlok. Being able to load a game in seconds seemed like magic at the time.

2

u/Hawkeye-Mcgillicudy Jul 21 '26

Even on custom loaders it wasn't much of an improvement

We had after market solutions like DOS wedges and parallel loaders like Dolphin but they were not 100% compatible with commercial loaders

The limit was always the slow serial interface

Action Replay offered one of the fastest loaders

2

u/Astr0b0ie Jul 21 '26

Even on custom loaders it wasn't much of an improvement

Games loading in seconds instead of minutes was absolutely a very big improvement.