I was lucky enough to see this talk in person at the Vintage Computer Festival West this year.<p>One of the absolute highlights (timestamp <a href="https://youtu.be/_1jXExwse08?t=1903" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/_1jXExwse08?t=1903</a>) was the incredible work on a custom disk loader that increased the throughput from 400 bytes/s to 7.5 kB/s! A writeup of that optimisation work, which was only published in 2013, can be found here: <a href="https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/gcr-decoding/index.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/gcr-decoding/index....</a>
I wrote one of the early fastload cartridges for the 1541 (Epyx had the famous one, but mine also did a fast format, and drive to drive backup across two 1541s) and am looking forward to going down memory lane with this talk! Thanks for the share!
Looking forward to watching this. His previous talks, such as the Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk, have been comprehensive, clear, while being very concise on each bit of info.
I remember, as a kid, playing copy protected games at night and hoping my dad didn't wake up mad at me because of all the CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACKing that the drive head was doing as the protection scheme was slamming it all the way to one side to read some bit of data.<p>Good times, man.
I was astonished to learn that it takes another 6502 to power the 1541 drive. Kinda neat if you think about it, and I believe someone has succeeded in using it as a 2nd processor, much like the famed 6502 coprocessor tube on the Acorn machines. Those days were great.