Most useless drive/computer combination?

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Gyro Gearloose
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Most useless drive/computer combination?

Post by Gyro Gearloose »

Unexpanded VIC-20 and SFD-1001 or Plus/4 and a 1570?

Discuss!


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Re: Most useless drive/computer combination?

Post by banman »

Hi Gyro Gearloose,


As a kid I had a Vic 20 with a clone 1541 (called a Skai64).

I could fit a large number of unexpanded programs on a single 360kb disk.
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Re: Most useless drive/computer combination?

Post by Gyro Gearloose »

I mean more hypothetically, back then I would never have been able to get my tiny hands on a SFD-1001. But a VIC-20 connected to a SFD-1001 would have 1 megabyte of disk storage, and unless you have an expansion chassis the IEEE card would take up the expansion port and you can't put more RAM. Like I guess maybe extra 3K internally but that's it. Like there would be space for 280 BASIC programs, or even more, but could the DOS even handle that many entries?

And the Plus/4 had its own parallel drive interface for the 1551, but the 1570 would have had burst mode which the Plus/4 can't use. And it's a single-sided version of the 1571 which just adds to the confusion.

Like can anyone thing of a more bizarre and useless setup? Like it would work, kind of, just not make a lot of sense.
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Re: Most useless drive/computer combination?

Post by Gyro Gearloose »

think, not thing. jfc ...
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Re: Most useless drive/computer combination?

Post by rmzalbar »

In my experience: ZX Spectrum 128k +3 with the FDD built in to the case where the data cassette unit used to go on previous models. This is a platform where 101% of commercial software for it was only on tape. On top of which, the FDD was an Amstrad 3" unit, for which disks are quite rare.

This model had support for CP/M and it was distributed on disks like this. However, the disk form factor and the lack of 80-column support made that useless. At least the Commodore 128 could handle standard double-sided 360k 5.25" disks and display 80 columns with its CP/M support.

It was pretty much only ever useful for distributing pirate Russian software.
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Re: Most useless drive/computer combination?

Post by banman »

Hi rmzalbar and Gyro Gearloose,


Interesting facts.

I actually think that there wasn't any commercial software that was distributed for the Vic 20. I think it was all tape and cartridge based.

Correct me please if I'm wrong here. I believe the crippling slow speed of the C64 disk drives was a direct result of Commodore wanting backwards compatibility with disk drives running off the Vic 20.
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Re: Most useless drive/computer combination?

Post by rmzalbar »

The 1541 story was a real comedy of errors and unhappy decisions.
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Re: Most useless drive/computer combination?

Post by Gyro Gearloose »

How about a CMD FD-2000 and an unexpanded VIC-20? Almost 2 megs of storage!
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Re: Most useless drive/computer combination?

Post by eslapion »

I put all my 8k and 16k cartridge ROM image on a 1581 floppy so SFD-1001 would be pretty much the same.

You can load a 16k ROM image in 3 seconds when using JiffyDOS so it's quite an improvement over loading Donkey Kong or Lunar Leeper with a datasette.
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