FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine • Hacker News Board

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#61

Post by foone » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 10:23 PM UTC

GNOMES wrote: post #53

I would love to see this on an LGR Oddware episode...

A few people have mentioned that! I'm keeping my eye out for a second one, so if I find one (or I figure out a way to talk to off-the-shelf hardware with this one) I'll send it his way and we can exchange disks.

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#62

Post by boomlinde » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 10:34 PM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #49

boomlinde wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fun bit of related trivia is that the 6502 in the Commodore 1541 disk drive is slightly faster than the 6510 in the PAL C64.

The 1541 had a whole 6502 embedded system in it??? TIL. Yet it was so astonishingly slow, it was a laughing stock among junior high school kids. Total garbage compared to the Apple II drives designed by Woz, which were just dumb hardware, combined with a logic state sequencer" on the circuit card and registers for step motor control.

Apparently they initially intended for it to have a fast parallel connection which would have meant a huge gain in speed, but they ended up with a serial bus on the C64 to be compatible with VIC-20 disk drives. This was supposed to be offset by hardware that could maintain a high serial speed, but the design ended up half broken, which they had to amend with the slow software routines before release.

It sucks, but it's nice that the computer could patch the disk drive at run-time and have it run some more sophisticated software for a speed boost. For example, the Action Replay 6 comes with a "fast loader" that performs some 18 times better than the kernal loader and stock 1541 firmware on normal CBM formatted disks. Still not as quick as Woz' Disk II...

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#63

Post by rasz » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 11:03 PM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #49

boomlinde wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fun bit of related trivia is that the 6502 in the Commodore 1541 disk drive is slightly faster than the 6510 in the PAL C64.

The 1541 had a whole 6502 embedded system in it??? TIL. Yet it was so astonishingly slow, it was a laughing stock among junior high school kids. Total garbage compared to the Apple II drives designed by Woz, which were just dumb hardware, combined with a logic state sequencer" on the circuit card and registers for step motor control.

In 1983 C64 was $300, 1541 was $300, 180K Tandon TM100-1 PC floppy drive was $189. Why sell cheap floppy drive when you can sell one for the full price of your computer and double the profit? Commodore was manufacturing all mayor chips inside it after all ;-/

It got even worse when Commodore shat C128D out its engineering hole. 3 CPUs for the low low price of 3 CPUs, two doing nothing 99.999% of the time, all in all 85% of Amiga 500 price, 100% of Atari 520ST price, at 10% the power.

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#64

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 12, 2018, 1:23 AM UTC

boomlinde wrote: post #26

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #18

The "oh look, this disk drive is actually a whole PC" aspect reminds me of the "Mr. Backup Z64" copier for Nintendo 64. It had a 386-class embedded PC running a ROM-based DOS system to operate the internal Zip drive. Since the Zip drive sat on a standard ATA interface being driven by DOS, it could be replaced with a hard drive or CompactFlash slot. More loosely, it's also reminiscent of the Commodore disk drives that…

A fun bit of related trivia is that the 6502 in the Commodore 1541 disk drive is slightly faster than the 6510 in the PAL C64.

[deleted]

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#65

Post by hcs » Fri, Oct 12, 2018, 1:25 AM UTC

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #18

The "oh look, this disk drive is actually a whole PC" aspect reminds me of the "Mr. Backup Z64" copier for Nintendo 64. It had a 386-class embedded PC running a ROM-based DOS system to operate the internal Zip drive. Since the Zip drive sat on a standard ATA interface being driven by DOS, it could be replaced with a hard drive or CompactFlash slot. More loosely, it's also reminiscent of the Commodore disk drives that…

Speaking of 6502, the Doctor V64 was another N64 copier, this time a 6502-based computer with a CD-ROM drive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_V64

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#66

Post by kalleboo » Fri, Oct 12, 2018, 2:10 AM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #12

Jaruzel wrote: post #2

Re-imagine this with USB ports instead of a floppy drive and internet instead of dial up, and you've got quite a cute data transfer device for very non technical people.

Or you could just email stuff

Even Gmail has a measly 25 MB attachment limit