Freezers, EPYX fastload, even Super Zaxxon differ from most ROM cartridges in that they have logic to switch things in and out of the C64 memory map. The EasyFlash has patches to emulate bankswitching, but it might not have the same timing as the real hardware and that is why it doesn't work with some board revisions. Fastload has a particularly awful way of doing it. There is a hex buffer in the cart wired to various control lines. When RESET, I/O1 (DE00-DEFF), or ROML (8000-9FFF if EXROM low) are pulled low so is EXROM, telling the PLA to map the cart via ROML when 8000-9FFF is accessed. So at reset and as long as the ROM in the cart is being accessed, it stays enabled. This makes it autostart at reset and installs the wedge. Once the CPU stops accessing ROML a capacitor on the EXROM line begins to charge from the pull-up resistor in the C64, eventually bringing EXROM to a logic high and disabling ROML. The capacitor is to keep EXROM low through VIC and CPU RAM access: it takes several cycles for EXROM to go high. I/O2 also enables the cart ROM, so part of the ROM is mirrored at DF00-DFFF. That's a shim that hits the I/O1 @ DE00 a few times to pull EXROM low and bring back ROML before jumping to it. Whew. Aside from taking over the ROM and both I/O regions, the worst part about fastload is there are delay loops to ensure EXROM is stable before accessing anything else, and the indeterminate logic levels caused by the EXROM cap charging and discharging can wreak havoc with some FPGA-based PLA replacements. The reason JiffyDOS is preferred to most other fastloaders is that it is a ROM upgrade, vs RAM or cart-based fastloaders. All fastloaders except for JiffyDOS have to use some RAM in the drive so they may have issues with copy protection and software fastloaders.
Indeterminate logic levels aside, I have to admit that was pretty clever. I'm making a wild guess here, but they might've done it that way to increase compatibility... the cartridge ROM is simply disabled (except for the mirror at DF00-DFFF) when it's not needed. So most games (at least the ones without their own custom loaders) wouldn't even be aware of its presence.
@@darkwinter6028 Yep. Old methods to adding small delay to data signals before controls. Of course very small value capacitors. Commonly used in slow systems (1-2 MHz clocked). In faster buses delays are matched by track length.
@Adrian's Digital Basement .. I assume that for "madness in the world" you mean the COVID-19 situation...... so (sorry for the Off topic) but this virus can survive in the plastic.. on that cartridge... up to NINE DAYS my friend .... ... as well as on glass... laminated surfaces like labels.... Metal like car's.. door handles etc.... Even on paper or cardboard can remain up to three or more days... So if someone infected sneezes or coughs on that cartridge or package.. well.. What I want to say is..... that you should have sanitized.. and you hands.... spraying it with your favorite..... isopropyl alcohol.... or with some Dettol.... >> www.bbc.com/future/article/20200317-covid-19-how-long-does-the-coronavirus-last-on-surfaces ..
Don’t stop making the videos, please. I’m in the same situation - no work to do except online training at home. Your videos are a welcome distraction from the situation. Thank you so much for making them!
Didnt realize Adrian never had a C64 as a kid. His knowledge and handling of the C64 always made me think he had one like myself. Great presentation of the fast loaders!
Crazy but I had a VIC-20 but then a series of Apple II machines up to the Apple IIgs. I honestly feel like I really missed out on the whole experience! The Apple II seems to crappy in comparison!
@@adriansdigitalbasement The Apple II was junk, but its competitors were the PET and TRS-80 in 1977 so that's forgivable. Its biggest problem was not enough evolution with the Apple //e and Apple //c. Of course eventually you got the IIgs which was an exciting machine. Some great capabilities though with less neat hacks than the C64. ...and the Amiga was out by then.
I grew up with an Apple //e... and it was indeed crappy in comparison. But it could have been so much better if I had understood its intricacies as a kid as well as I do now... and had more configuration and accessories. Most importantly, we were stuck with a little black&white Monitor II because my father insisted a colour monitor upgrade would be too expensive... I had no idea at the time that it supported colour output to TV by default.
@@KomradeMikhail It only was crappy in sound and graphics, but the one cool thing was that it had expansion slots,and there were add-in cards for different graphics and sounds. It was quite hackable as well.
Dunno anybody else with this expertise like Adrian when it comes to the Commodore 64. So a surprise for me too. he didn't had one as kid. Never opened mine. But a friend, working in an electronic company did. From somewhere - and I really wonder in the days with no internet or BBS - he got a hacked kernal rom, which included a fast loader and a assembly monitor and "burned" it onto an eprom. I seem to remember he soldered it on top of the original kernal and added a switch to the backside of the computer to switch between hack and original.
Warp speed was released later in the 80's. Most people concerned with drive speed already had the Fastload cartridge, or even JiffyDOS. So, there was limited interest in replacing existing fast loaders. I had both the Fastload and the Warp Speed cartridge. It usually put Fastload to shame.
The proof that Odell Lake has its own custom loader is that the screen didn't blank. The FastLoad cartridge *blanks the screen* when loading. A stock 1541 has a transfer speed of approximately 490 bytes per second; with a FastLoad cartridge, the transfer speed is slightly under 2500 bytes per second. Adrian's tests showed that a FastLoad cartridge loaded Portal about 250% faster, which jives with the statistics. (EDIT: I think I'm wrong about the Fastload cartridge blanking the screen. It's been so long since I've used one that I'm not sure.) As for the Warp Speed cartridge, its biggest problem was compatibility with games written in 1985 or later, most of which had their own custom loaders (Epyx's Vorpal loader, Cinemaware's V-MAX! loader, etc.) Both the Fastload cartridge and the Warp Speed cartridge had games that they weren't compatible with. Some games even required you to physically remove the cartridge before they would load. Out of all the games I owned, there was *one* game that required me to remove my Fastload cartridge; with the Warp Speed cartridge, nearly a *third* of my games wouldn't load without removing the cartridge. (Of course, I later modded my Fastload cartridge to have an on/off switch and a reset button. So instead of actually removing the cartridge, I'd just flick it off and press the reset button. It's remarkably easy to do.) On the other hand, if you put a Fastload cartridge in a C128, it will boot in C64 mode. The Warp Speed cartridge is unique in that it is compatible with either the C64 or the C128. Also, Warp Speed v2 was compatible with the 1541, 1571, and 1581 disk drives, whereas the Fastload cartridge is not compatible with the 1581. As a side note, both an unmodified 1541 and a Fastload cartridge writes to disk in a 1:10 interleave. That is to say, when writing a file to a blank disk, it would write to sector 1, sector 11, sector 2, sector 12, etc., in that order. JiffyDOS and Warp Speed both used a 1:5 interleave.
Wow, now this saddens me but my reply was removed and I have no idea why. I am beginning to no longer post comments on YT as this place is horrible even when you are on your best behaviour.
Wrong! Just kidding. You seem to have quite a bit of knowledge about these loaders! Down to the bytes per second! Now if only a patch could be made for battletech. I am playing it right now and the disk access memory swaps are killing me. Still, it is a ton of fun to play this. There was only one official FASA computer game and I am thankful for it. Even if it accesses the drive every time you enter a building or ten times as you walk through a "city".
Warp Speed was a fairly late comer to the C64 and didn't work with well with a lot of software unless it was single file games. Even then the way it worked was a compromise and just like high speed tape loaders you could have problems loading things and need to try several times. The EPYX fast load was one of the very few true transparent solutions that offered around 5x loading speed and worked with almost every software program. So much so I pretty much had one permanently installed on my C64.
I've heard this before but this definitely didn't match my actual experience with Warp Speed. I found it to be extremely compatible. Maybe I am glorifying my memory, but I know for certain that my go-to games worked with it whether they had their own fastloader or not. I do wonder if maybe this could be a Warpspeed 2.0 compatibility improvement, though I thought I had a v1.3... Maybe the second one I picked up is 1.3 and my original a 2.0? I need to confirm....
@@CommodoreGreg Depends on how good your disk drive was and/or if the drive that recorded the disk was in alignment. While I think of it another software fast loader for disk was VORPAL.
The Epyx Fastload was one of the first on the scene and was available anywhere you could buy software. This made it very popular by being easily accessible. My buddy back in the day bought a Mach 5 cartridge. It worked fine. Some things loaded faster, some slower. He bought it through mail order. I bought my Epyx cart early on. As other cartridges came out and being faster like the Warp Speed, I wanted one, but being a kid at the time didn't want to spend the money for something I basically already had.
Interesting to see many folks here that never had a C64 themselves, (Myself included.) but are fascinated to see your work here. In my case, I started early with the TRS-80 Model I, and moved on to the Tandy Coco line, while my one of friends got a C64 and the other got an Atari. So betheen the 3 of us, we nearly had the full spectrum of early 80's home compute covered!! Good times. I still have my original Model I form '77, and have been slowly collecting bits for it. I'm researching now on how to leverage the dual chip floppy controller to see if I can load data from a high density drive, and eventually my floppy emulator-to-usb thumb drive, so I can easily load images, and then write them to real disks. Thanks for the inspiration to dust off the old gear, and bring it to life!
Being from Wisconsin, I totally recognize the Minnesota Educational Computing Corp from elementary school. Playing Oregon Trail on an Apple 2e was badass!
@@adriansdigitalbasement We definitely had a bunch of MECC stuff in New Hampshire! The later releases from MECC had a "Teacher Disk" that allowed the teacher to review student's progress, or configure the program to the student's needs - like programming a math game to give more emphasis on certain types of problems. There was I recall a special copy program they had that, if I remember correctly, allows the school to make copy-protected copies of the programs that the school was licensed for, up to the number of copies allowed. (If the school was licensed for, say, 20 copies of a program, the copy software would stop after that many copies. I am not sure if there was a way to "delete" or "deactivate" unneeded or old/damaged copies, to allow fresh copies to be made). Not sure how accurate my memory of this is, as it was back in the late 1980's! :)
I knew the programmer of this. Scott Nelson at Epyx Games. He was an employee there. (I still talk to his wife, but they got divorced, so haven't had any contact with him though recently.)
OMG, I so loved that game and the music of it. It seriously calmed me down and was just relaxing to play and no game made since would ever be like it even remotely for me.
Nice comparison. Would love to see the final cartridge 3 tested as well :) That's what I used back in the day (ex-eastblock user, so VERY late in the game for the 64)
As a kid the fastload cart never left the slot. Practically unusable without it. Massive speed improvement, even the wait on power up reduced significantly. Never used tapes so I can only comment on the 1541. When I pulled it from the attic a year ago it was still installed. Slot is a little loose now but it still works! Recapped the C64 and built a new power supply since the original was missing but all the caps measured good. No need for a PLA yet but it's great to know there's a cheap replacement now.
I had an Action Replay MK3 (MK2 originally) and my disk drive was an Enhancer 2000 as I couldn't get a 1541. So when people used to complain about disk loading speeds I didn't know what they were on about.
Thanks for continuing to make videos. Working at home now and the evenings are quiet with all the madness enforcing the whole social distancing thing. Your videos are a great source of comfort; something entertaining and familiar.
I really liked the Dolphin DOS parallel fast loader for the 1541 back in the day, it was so much faster than a stock drive, but you did have to install a custom board in your drive.
As a bonus, for me at least, this video is not only a distraction from Corona but also the 5.7M earthquake I got to experience yesterday. To old to shake, rattle, and roll. Thanks Adrian, stay safe!
What might be the case for Odell Lake is that it calls a KERNAL initialization routine. Cartridge fastloaders depend on the LOAD/SAVE vectors from $0300 onwards in the memory. The KERNAL initialization routine resets these to the default KERNAL routines, disabling the cartridge fastloader. Because JiffyDOS modifies the routines inside the KERNAL, it doesn't get disabled by this KERNAL initialization routine. In my youth years I had patched several of my games converting this call to the KERNAL initialization into NOPs, so I could use my cartridge fastloaders. I had the KCS Power Cartridge and Final Cartridge III back then. Both are superior to the Epyx Fastload cartridge and especially the FC3 fastloader is a really advanced piece of technology. It loads a file out-of-order, so it doesn't need to wait until the right sector is under the head and it has a highly optimized GCR decoding routine intertwined with the serial communication code.
That's not surprising. JiffyDOS required minimal hardware changes, both in the drive and in the C64. Specifically, you had to replace a few ROM chips. As easy as that sounds to someone like you or me, it's beyond the abilities of most end users. So the various fastload cartridges (Fastload, Super Snapshot, Warp Speed 5, etc.) were more popular because there was no hardware modification involved. It was so easy, anyone could do it.
Eventually, fast load code became part of many loading processes for games on the 64, especially if they were from the bigger publishers. Some tape loaders even have their own version. There was a very interesting type-in program in one of those old 8 bit magazines (forget which one) that would allow you to save your code to tape in a special altered forma that would speed it up by many times, to greater than 1541 speeds. The beauty of it was that you didn't need any special code to load the new formatted tape code. Once saved on tape, you just loaded it like any other program except this time it loads 5 or more times faster! I really miss those old 8 bit magazines and their type in games and utilities (even though often times you'd have to search through your code to find that ONE misplaced character that keeps the whole thing from running!) It was an era I sorely miss, that the clone PC world has never been able to duplicate.
Had the Epyx Fastload for some time, but then I upgraded to the Super Snapshot which was faster in every way. It worked with more games than the Epyx Fastload too. Also, if memory serves me well, if you just hit Commodore-Run Stop it will do LOAD"*",8,1
One thing I found with the Epyx fastloader, is a lot of my games would show different loading screens. konami boot camp, crazy cars, TMNT, all loaded different load screens. It was neat!
When I had my Commodore 64 I had a fast loader call vorpal fast loader. I found this on a Google search. The Epyx Fast Load is a floppy disk fast loader cartridge made by American software company Epyx in 1984 for the Commodore 64 home computer. It was programmed by Epyx employee Scott Nelson, who was originally a programmer for Starpath and later designed the Epyx Vorpal fastloading system for the company's games.
Fast load was pretty awesome at the time. I think we modded it with a reset button too. C64s crashed a lot and the reset button helped get you back again quicker. Back then we would have "pizza parties" where people would bring boxes full of floppy disks, and trade games. Some folks even had disk duplicating machines with 2 disk drives. Sometimes we needed copy programs like pink panther and fast crackem.
Test with any of the SSI gold-box games such as Pool of Radiance or Curse of the Azure Bonds. They have a fastloader, but allow you a chance to turn their built-in fastloaders off before they start. It'll be a good comparison betwen JiffyDOS, stock, Epyx, and the SSI speed loader. :)
@@KingMob4313 True, but i played them all, I spent a long time at the C64 playing Pool of Radiance, Curse, Secret of the Silver Blades & Death Knights of Krynn etc. I still have all the games. The worse part was 4 double sided disks, so there was lots of disk swapping and flipping, as you needed a disk for your save game too.
@@KingMob4313 I've learned that jiffydos makes them remarkably fast, especially if you have a larger storage device; you can copy all the files into one large disk or directory and never swap disks. :)
The commodore 64 was the first computer I actually purchased. When I purchased mine, it was one of the earlier C64s. I used a C64 for every computer task until I moved on to the Amiga. Nearly all people who had C64's early on, started out with a cassette tape based loading system. It was incredibly slow. By the time people were able to afford the expensive 1541 disk drive, we were starving for any performance increase possible. The 1541 delivered that performance and was much, much easier to use. The Epyx Fastload Cartridge when it came out, was extremely expensive and in the era of some of the most brutal copy protection ever created, a lot of programs would not work with the fastload, if you could afford to purchase one! Very few people I was around at the time ever spent the money on a Fastload cartridge. Almost no one compared disk drive performance with other disk drives, because most of us could not afford more than one computer! If the choice was a fastload cartridge or another box of 5.25 disks, we'd take the box of disks every time. Don't forget we were using modems and the bit rate (baud) of modems was constantly increasing, forcing people to upgrade to new modems regularly. I went from 300bps, to 1200bps, to 2400 bps, to 9600bps to 19200 bps... There was a lot to spend money on with this computer and the fastload cartridge did not make as much difference as things like a new modem or boxes of disks for more software, and back ups of the programs we wrote at the time. The Epyx Fastload Cartridge would have made more of an impact had it came out 2 years earlier. By the time it came out, people were already moving on to other, more capable computers like the Amiga 1000, then the A500/A2000s. By this time, the PC started developing "mass" with all the PC clones that were available. Only businesses dealt with IBM. Everyone else purchased clones for less than half the cost of the IBM PC.
Not only is warp speed fast as hell, but I have never had a conflict with disks that have their own fast loader. i.e. It always transitions gracefully to other fastloaders. I've been lucky enough to have had one since childhood. Bonus: Warp Speed carts also have a C64C128 switch (for use with 128 mode) and reset button. Best cart that existed back in the day IMO. Yes, it's been under everyone's radar forever. I think it only took a back seat to Epyx Fastload because it came out later. Another bonus is that in a C64 the 128 switch effectively acts as a disable switch.
The Epyx FastLoad cart was super common in North America. It was readily available, cheap, and worked pretty well. The more advanced SuperSnapShot also has a fast loader and more features then the Epyx cart but was less common and more money. TFW8B FastLoad Reloaded is quite nice too and supports IEC2SD. I use it sometimes though I mostly use Action Replay now.
I remember the game "Destroyer". It was a real pain without any fastload but was great with Epyx fast load. The best utility I had for the C64 was "VORPAL UTILITIES" which required reformating floppies but was fast as hell.
The real FastLoad cartridge uses a 470nF capacitor as a form of delay. Since the PLA finds itself exposed to an analog signal (a slow ramp), the hysteresis effect on the inputs of the PLA is critical to proper functioning. See: Schematics of FastLoad - rr.pokefinder.org/wiki/Epyx_FastLoad Hysteresis in electronic circuits - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis#Electronic_circuits
Thank you for continuing to do videos, especially now as it really helps those of us on Lock Down in California thanks to CV19. My dad bought the Epyx Fastload in 1984 and I still have it. There were plenty of games that used their own disk routines that it simply could not speed up. But it did work with a fair number of programs and most productivity software that we had at the time. It was basically always in the cartridge port for years until I got an Action Replay which had insane speeds, especially when a file was saved with Warp 25. The game I was playing a lot back then was Ultima III and FastLoad didn't do much for it. The creator of WarpSpeed has discussed those days in detail over on Lemon64. His forum name is AlienTech
Cool! Yeah I can imagine it was disappointing when a game or program used its own slow routines and didn't give you the choice to use alternate ones. I can really imagine how useful these tools were back in the day though -- for the reasons you mentioned.
The reason why it didnt work so well on the Ultima III was because it had its own "dos" that accessed the data on the disk by doing direct block-reads rather than the standard "load a file" process. I wonder if the more modern patch/hacked versions like U4 gold, or the U3 version of thath etc would work with Fastload but than again, they come with their own fastload routines.
@@RickTheGeek Exactly. It was quite common in the early C64 days for companies to use their own routines. I am glad in later years things changed and many more games had good speed loaders or did not interfere with speeder carts. Yeah U3 Gold is for sure better in this department.
@@adriansdigitalbasement At the time the Fastload cart was a must. I didn't know anyone that I traded software with back then that didn't have one. Super useful. It wasn't until I started working with TRS-80 and Apple IIs in High School that I realized just how slow the C64 drives were.
With the Atari 8-bit, if we wanted to load data faster, we just made the drive work better with a DOS supporting it. Like the US Doubler by ICD with SpartaDOS X.
Great video. Couple things... First, I wish you'd tried the Super Snapshot to see what time it gets as it is a fast load cartridge too. Second, it would be good to type run after loading to make sure it actually loaded properly. I'm super surprised at that Warp Speed one.
Epix Fastload doesn't really do anything tricky, it's just a ROM. It installs itself much like a DOS Wedge. The Commodore 64 Kernal uses the Zero Page for bits of code it needs to run faster, and because of that the code can be changed to wedge in extra code, since the Zero Page is just RAM. The EasyFlash cartridge doesn't need to emulate anything to just put something in ROM space. Where it does something tricky is with replacing an entire kernal, or a snapshot cartridge. Also, large cartridges like Ocean 512K etc, have more than just a ROM, as they need to switch banks, so they tend to have a couple support TTL chips. BTW, I spell kernel wrong, because every manual that Commodore talks about a kernel, they call it kernal, so I guess that's the name of their operating system.
Check out the pinned comment on this video about how the EPYX cart work. It definitely does trickery and non standard things -- and yes the term KERNAL goes back to the Commodore PET in 1977.
An original Fastload. I have one of the clones :) Also working at home, I live by myself and some of my friends are vulnerable and so can't really risk meeting them. So it is a crazy time. But it's time to learn new things I guess.
The EPYX fastload worked great back in the mid-80s for speeding up load times. I would recommend using an early EA title to test the fastloaders. Something along the lines of Archon, Seven Cities of Gold, or M.U.L.E. These titles were VERY slow to load on a stock system and the EPYX cartridge sped them up nicely. I think the EPYX cartridge was popular not only because it came out earlier than many of the others, but it was also relatively inexpensive at the time.
Another one to test is Fast Hack’em fast boot. I used that one for many years until I got a JiffyDOS system. (Although if I remember right, while it’s fast it’s not as fast as JiffyDOS.) One thing I tried was converting some single file programs with Turbotape, and those loaded faster off a cassette than they did from a plain stock 1541 (or JD 1541 with JiffyDOS switched off). Crunching programs with something like Bit Imploder to make them smaller can also help load speeds, especially when combined with a fast loader.
I liked FastLoad. I can't say I noticed an improved time loading with software, but I appreciated the Wedge features for easy directory listings. Also the built-in machine code editor. Although it had disk copy features, I preferred to use 3rd party software like Fast Hack'em.
I do remember having warp speed at one time. Always thought it was weird looking cartridge as it had a Cinemaware logo on it, but had it had several awesome utility tools like fastloader(obviously), sector editor, Assembly monitor, etc. if my memory serves me right it had a disk copying feature built into it as well.
I had a Warp Speed in the 80s. While its better than Fast Load, its had quite a few compatibility issues from memory. I often had to remove it. Also the Warp Speed cart came with a Reset Button, while on the fast load it was a often made mod, but it wasnt stock.
Oh wow. I think we may have had Odell Lake at my grade school, running on an Apple II. It's been so long, I'm not even sure, but boy is that name familiar. I know we had Oregon Trail (another MECC title) for that machine for sure.
I mostly used Ultraload, first from floppy (load Ultraload first, run it and then load the game) and later from an EPROM card. I then switched to something called Starload (or Starloader, I can't remember exactly), because it was slightly faster. I never used a dedicated fastload cartridge back in the days.
Star-Dos. It was I think one of the earliest Final Cartridge type cartridges. I remember the advertising said, besides all the stuff it could do, it made terrible coffee. :) There was also "ICEPIC" which was one of the first freeze devices, it would freeze the memory in the computer, dump it to disk and then you could load and run it later on, without having the cartridge. It took a while to load, I remember because my copy of Bruce Lee was ISEPICed. :)
I'm looking forward to the day when you discover hardware floppy speeders ;) I was involved in the re-issue of the professional DOS/RapiDOS speeder ... loads 250 blocks in 4 seconds :) Ideally you'll check out the recent follow up project called MeGaLoDOS which attempts to unify a number of hardware speeders ... including those which load a full floppy once and then exclusively work out of RAM (i.e. TurboTrans) ... loading 250 blocks in less than 2 seconds.
I had a Fastload I bought used from a guy who bought a Mach 5. Then I got a Final Cartridge 3 and bought a Mach 5 with a used C-64. Being an Atarian early in my computing life (my first computer was an atari 800xl) I REALLY hated using floppies on my C-64. :) I had (anecdotally) better luck with Mach 5.
Thank you for all the great videos as usual, and the extra content during these tough times. I had a C64 when I was about 9. My favorite game was Sid Meier's Pirates!. I don't remember anything about fast loaders and some of the other utilities you use, so it is pretty cool to see them in action. Also, shoutout to #8bitdanceparty. The old Mac and PC content is great, too. Thanks again!
Fastload works by overlaying itself in when programs are the standard vectors for load and save, etc. If a program uses its own load routines, the Fastload ROM won't get enabled. I made knock-offs of these back in the day. Cool gadget.
Should have my parts for these early next week. Great to see that it's working with various carts. Kind of off-topic @Adrian: What's the LED matrix "tv" in the background? Is there a video of it?
I have to Epyx Fast Loader. It is hit or miss with SOME games. But for the most part, it has always cut times in half or more. I am running it now on a standard, unmodified C64 and no issues.
Back in the mid '80s I remember using a fastloader that was a small file on the disk with the filename of an up arrow character. To activate it you'd type load "[up arrow]*filename*",8,1. The screen would slowly fill with garbage characters then clear and the drive would take off and load at the rate of about 3 head steps every 2 seconds. The file was small - about 10 blocks and could simply be copied onto any disk where there was enough free space. I have no idea what it was called though - it was 35 years ago.
Yes, those were software fastloaders. They have two main disadvantages, the first that you have to load them explicitly, which decreases the convenience of them a lot. But their main disadvantage was compatibility: C64 software will assume that it has all of the computer available: There are no provisions in the operating system to divide the memory across several applications in a fair way. Therefore a software fastloader will often try to hide itself in fewer used parts of memory, but there is still a lot of software that will use the memory where the software fastloader tries to hide. Cartridge fastloaders don't have these disadvantages: They install themselves on power on, no user action required. Because these cartridges only activate their ROM when it is needed, they are able to hide themselves very well from software, they don't use any RAM that be used by software. The third category are KERNAL fastloaders such as JiffyDOS: These replace the C64 KERNAL. Their advantage over cartridge fastloaders is that they can speed up all disk operations, not just the operation that can be hooked. If software uses SEQ or USR files, those are typically not speed up by cartridges, but are speed up by KERNAL fastloaders.
If i remember correctly some of the fastloader uses some really smart on the fly compression to get data faster through the cable. This gave some advantages with uncompressed games/programs. But i really don't know the details.
I suppose that for future purposes you can just save time by doing "Laps" which is the below text (below the time). You could just do another lap for another measure of time :)
I had a Danish fastloader back in the days. I at some time stumbled upon it again - although I'm not totally sure it's the same version (edit: revision there's sure very much similarity on all parameters) - hardware wise with a red and blue button sure. That is also significantly faster than the Epyx - without weird analog (capacitor) tricky like the Epyx.
The first game tested probably does not "load" the other files but reads them sequentially with file I/O which jiffydos also speeds up and all "normal" fast loaders without drive kernel replacement I know of not. I never had jiffydos at the time but the epix before switching to dolpin dos. The epix fastload was the first I encountered which loaded with screen on, jiffydos I did not even know about before GEOS times. OT: Someone commented on tape loaders. The well known tape loader "turbo tape" which loads with left arrow + L was 10 times faster as normal tape load, floppy disk without fast load only 7 times. Most commercial games on tape used slower loaders, some even with screen on block counter, space invaders during load, music etc. I created a variant of this turbo tape as "Turbo+" where I made the 1 shorter and the 0 longer than the original on save so the bits can be better distinguished with VIC interference. It had the same speed but you could load the files with screen on. I added a command to toggle if the screen is on during load to be able to load the original format. But that was quite late so it did not spread I think. The "magic" tool mentioned which allows you to load games from tape without a special loader just writes a stripped down autostart turbo tape before saving the actual saved file in turbo tape format. At least the one I dissassembled before I even had a floppy disk drive to get at the saved program and the fast loader as it also started the loaded program. Some 3rd party casette recorders had a speaker so you could hear and distinguish the loaders. As disks were expensive I used tapes much longer to "archive" files. I also wrote a menu program where you could input the time or tape counter of my tape (do not remember exactly) which then switched off the tape motor at the approximate position of the desired file during fast forward.
Freezers, EPYX fastload, even Super Zaxxon differ from most ROM cartridges in that they have logic to switch things in and out of the C64 memory map. The EasyFlash has patches to emulate bankswitching, but it might not have the same timing as the real hardware and that is why it doesn't work with some board revisions.
Fastload has a particularly awful way of doing it. There is a hex buffer in the cart wired to various control lines. When RESET, I/O1 (DE00-DEFF), or ROML (8000-9FFF if EXROM low) are pulled low so is EXROM, telling the PLA to map the cart via ROML when 8000-9FFF is accessed. So at reset and as long as the ROM in the cart is being accessed, it stays enabled. This makes it autostart at reset and installs the wedge. Once the CPU stops accessing ROML a capacitor on the EXROM line begins to charge from the pull-up resistor in the C64, eventually bringing EXROM to a logic high and disabling ROML. The capacitor is to keep EXROM low through VIC and CPU RAM access: it takes several cycles for EXROM to go high. I/O2 also enables the cart ROM, so part of the ROM is mirrored at DF00-DFFF. That's a shim that hits the I/O1 @ DE00 a few times to pull EXROM low and bring back ROML before jumping to it. Whew.
Aside from taking over the ROM and both I/O regions, the worst part about fastload is there are delay loops to ensure EXROM is stable before accessing anything else, and the indeterminate logic levels caused by the EXROM cap charging and discharging can wreak havoc with some FPGA-based PLA replacements.
The reason JiffyDOS is preferred to most other fastloaders is that it is a ROM upgrade, vs RAM or cart-based fastloaders. All fastloaders except for JiffyDOS have to use some RAM in the drive so they may have issues with copy protection and software fastloaders.
Great explanation! Pinned!
A cap on an IO line? Yuck.
Indeterminate logic levels aside, I have to admit that was pretty clever. I'm making a wild guess here, but they might've done it that way to increase compatibility... the cartridge ROM is simply disabled (except for the mirror at DF00-DFFF) when it's not needed. So most games (at least the ones without their own custom loaders) wouldn't even be aware of its presence.
@@darkwinter6028 Yep. Old methods to adding small delay to data signals before controls. Of course very small value capacitors. Commonly used in slow systems (1-2 MHz clocked).
In faster buses delays are matched by track length.
@Adrian's Digital Basement .. I assume that for "madness in the world" you mean the COVID-19 situation...... so (sorry for the Off topic) but this virus can survive in the plastic.. on that cartridge... up to NINE DAYS my friend .... ... as well as on glass... laminated surfaces like labels.... Metal like car's.. door handles etc....
Even on paper or cardboard can remain up to three or more days...
So if someone infected sneezes or coughs on that cartridge or package.. well..
What I want to say is..... that you should have sanitized.. and you hands.... spraying it with your favorite..... isopropyl alcohol.... or with some Dettol....
>> www.bbc.com/future/article/20200317-covid-19-how-long-does-the-coronavirus-last-on-surfaces
..
Don’t stop making the videos, please. I’m in the same situation - no work to do except online training at home. Your videos are a welcome distraction from the situation. Thank you so much for making them!
Hopefully your industry was bailed out by the orange idiot...if so enjoy your time off training.
I have been working from home.. 19 days without break right now.. and I am very tired
Didnt realize Adrian never had a C64 as a kid. His knowledge and handling of the C64 always made me think he had one like myself. Great presentation of the fast loaders!
Crazy but I had a VIC-20 but then a series of Apple II machines up to the Apple IIgs. I honestly feel like I really missed out on the whole experience! The Apple II seems to crappy in comparison!
@@adriansdigitalbasement The Apple II was junk, but its competitors were the PET and TRS-80 in 1977 so that's forgivable. Its biggest problem was not enough evolution with the Apple //e and Apple //c.
Of course eventually you got the IIgs which was an exciting machine. Some great capabilities though with less neat hacks than the C64. ...and the Amiga was out by then.
I grew up with an Apple //e... and it was indeed crappy in comparison.
But it could have been so much better if I had understood its intricacies as a kid as well as I do now... and had more configuration and accessories.
Most importantly, we were stuck with a little black&white Monitor II because my father insisted a colour monitor upgrade would be too expensive... I had no idea at the time that it supported colour output to TV by default.
@@KomradeMikhail It only was crappy in sound and graphics, but the one cool thing was that it had expansion slots,and there were add-in cards for different graphics and sounds. It was quite hackable as well.
Dunno anybody else with this expertise like Adrian when it comes to the Commodore 64. So a surprise for me too. he didn't had one as kid.
Never opened mine. But a friend, working in an electronic company did. From somewhere - and I really wonder in the days with no internet or BBS - he got a hacked kernal rom, which included a fast loader and a assembly monitor and "burned" it onto an eprom. I seem to remember he soldered it on top of the original kernal and added a switch to the backside of the computer to switch between hack and original.
Normally, I am a guy who always skips intros, but Yours is so good, that I don't skip it because I love it!!
Glad you enjoy it!
It's a nice tune.
lol. I thot i was the only one doing this. It's a very creative and appropriate intro. Bravo to him.
My 3 year old daughter breaks down and dances to it every time!
Probably good timing wit cool msx work here. Yes it really sweet to look and hearing.
Warp speed was released later in the 80's. Most people concerned with drive speed already had the Fastload cartridge, or even JiffyDOS. So, there was limited interest in replacing existing fast loaders. I had both the Fastload and the Warp Speed cartridge. It usually put Fastload to shame.
The proof that Odell Lake has its own custom loader is that the screen didn't blank. The FastLoad cartridge *blanks the screen* when loading. A stock 1541 has a transfer speed of approximately 490 bytes per second; with a FastLoad cartridge, the transfer speed is slightly under 2500 bytes per second. Adrian's tests showed that a FastLoad cartridge loaded Portal about 250% faster, which jives with the statistics. (EDIT: I think I'm wrong about the Fastload cartridge blanking the screen. It's been so long since I've used one that I'm not sure.)
As for the Warp Speed cartridge, its biggest problem was compatibility with games written in 1985 or later, most of which had their own custom loaders (Epyx's Vorpal loader, Cinemaware's V-MAX! loader, etc.) Both the Fastload cartridge and the Warp Speed cartridge had games that they weren't compatible with. Some games even required you to physically remove the cartridge before they would load. Out of all the games I owned, there was *one* game that required me to remove my Fastload cartridge; with the Warp Speed cartridge, nearly a *third* of my games wouldn't load without removing the cartridge. (Of course, I later modded my Fastload cartridge to have an on/off switch and a reset button. So instead of actually removing the cartridge, I'd just flick it off and press the reset button. It's remarkably easy to do.)
On the other hand, if you put a Fastload cartridge in a C128, it will boot in C64 mode. The Warp Speed cartridge is unique in that it is compatible with either the C64 or the C128. Also, Warp Speed v2 was compatible with the 1541, 1571, and 1581 disk drives, whereas the Fastload cartridge is not compatible with the 1581. As a side note, both an unmodified 1541 and a Fastload cartridge writes to disk in a 1:10 interleave. That is to say, when writing a file to a blank disk, it would write to sector 1, sector 11, sector 2, sector 12, etc., in that order. JiffyDOS and Warp Speed both used a 1:5 interleave.
You had to remove the Fastload cart even if you disabled it in its menu?
Wow, now this saddens me but my reply was removed and I have no idea why. I am beginning to no longer post comments on YT as this place is horrible even when you are on your best behaviour.
There was no link though I was just commenting on my knowledge of the cartridge and how it worked having dissected it back then.
Fastload doesn't blank the screen
Wrong! Just kidding. You seem to have quite a bit of knowledge about these loaders! Down to the bytes per second! Now if only a patch could be made for battletech. I am playing it right now and the disk access memory swaps are killing me. Still, it is a ton of fun to play this. There was only one official FASA computer game and I am thankful for it. Even if it accesses the drive every time you enter a building or ten times as you walk through a "city".
Warp Speed was a fairly late comer to the C64 and didn't work with well with a lot of software unless it was single file games. Even then the way it worked was a compromise and just like high speed tape loaders you could have problems loading things and need to try several times. The EPYX fast load was one of the very few true transparent solutions that offered around 5x loading speed and worked with almost every software program. So much so I pretty much had one permanently installed on my C64.
I've heard this before but this definitely didn't match my actual experience with Warp Speed. I found it to be extremely compatible. Maybe I am glorifying my memory, but I know for certain that my go-to games worked with it whether they had their own fastloader or not. I do wonder if maybe this could be a Warpspeed 2.0 compatibility improvement, though I thought I had a v1.3... Maybe the second one I picked up is 1.3 and my original a 2.0? I need to confirm....
@@CommodoreGreg Depends on how good your disk drive was and/or if the drive that recorded the disk was in alignment. While I think of it another software fast loader for disk was VORPAL.
The Epyx Fastload was one of the first on the scene and was available anywhere you could buy software. This made it very popular by being easily accessible. My buddy back in the day bought a Mach 5 cartridge. It worked fine. Some things loaded faster, some slower. He bought it through mail order. I bought my Epyx cart early on. As other cartridges came out and being faster like the Warp Speed, I wanted one, but being a kid at the time didn't want to spend the money for something I basically already had.
Interesting to see many folks here that never had a C64 themselves, (Myself included.) but are fascinated to see your work here. In my case, I started early with the TRS-80 Model I, and moved on to the Tandy Coco line, while my one of friends got a C64 and the other got an Atari. So betheen the 3 of us, we nearly had the full spectrum of early 80's home compute covered!! Good times. I still have my original Model I form '77, and have been slowly collecting bits for it. I'm researching now on how to leverage the dual chip floppy controller to see if I can load data from a high density drive, and eventually my floppy emulator-to-usb thumb drive, so I can easily load images, and then write them to real disks. Thanks for the inspiration to dust off the old gear, and bring it to life!
Being from Wisconsin, I totally recognize the Minnesota Educational Computing Corp from elementary school. Playing Oregon Trail on an Apple 2e was badass!
We had loads and loads of MECC stuff here in New York too.
Yeah I think it was quite common across the entire US and Canada :-)
@@adriansdigitalbasement We definitely had a bunch of MECC stuff in New Hampshire! The later releases from MECC had a "Teacher Disk" that allowed the teacher to review student's progress, or configure the program to the student's needs - like programming a math game to give more emphasis on certain types of problems. There was I recall a special copy program they had that, if I remember correctly, allows the school to make copy-protected copies of the programs that the school was licensed for, up to the number of copies allowed. (If the school was licensed for, say, 20 copies of a program, the copy software would stop after that many copies. I am not sure if there was a way to "delete" or "deactivate" unneeded or old/damaged copies, to allow fresh copies to be made). Not sure how accurate my memory of this is, as it was back in the late 1980's! :)
@@adriansdigitalbasement Yeah, I remember them being pretty big in the educational market. It just so happened that I was right next door.....lol.
I knew the programmer of this. Scott Nelson at Epyx Games. He was an employee there. (I still talk to his wife, but they got divorced, so haven't had any contact with him though recently.)
I remember The EPYX Fastload making a huge difference with loading M.U.L.E but maybe that's just my memory.
Can confirm works great for MULE in the modern day.
OMG, I so loved that game and the music of it. It seriously calmed me down and was just relaxing to play and no game made since would ever be like it even remotely for me.
@wargent99 We have a disk that every game, without fail, the first event is a parasite attack on the top river-valley plot.
Nice comparison. Would love to see the final cartridge 3 tested as well :) That's what I used back in the day (ex-eastblock user, so VERY late in the game for the 64)
I was always very happy with the fastloader on the Action Replay VI, kind of a nice surprise as I bought it for the other features.
As a kid the fastload cart never left the slot. Practically unusable without it. Massive speed improvement, even the wait on power up reduced significantly. Never used tapes so I can only comment on the 1541. When I pulled it from the attic a year ago it was still installed. Slot is a little loose now but it still works! Recapped the C64 and built a new power supply since the original was missing but all the caps measured good. No need for a PLA yet but it's great to know there's a cheap replacement now.
I had an Action Replay MK3 (MK2 originally) and my disk drive was an Enhancer 2000 as I couldn't get a 1541. So when people used to complain about disk loading speeds I didn't know what they were on about.
Thanks for continuing to make videos. Working at home now and the evenings are quiet with all the madness enforcing the whole social distancing thing. Your videos are a great source of comfort; something entertaining and familiar.
4:27 I bet Adrian is going to build a C64C with a dark keyboard. That would match the drive perfectly!
I really liked the Dolphin DOS parallel fast loader for the 1541 back in the day, it was so much faster than a stock drive, but you did have to install a custom board in your drive.
As a bonus, for me at least, this video is not only a distraction from Corona but also the 5.7M earthquake I got to experience yesterday. To old to shake, rattle, and roll. Thanks Adrian, stay safe!
What might be the case for Odell Lake is that it calls a KERNAL initialization routine. Cartridge fastloaders depend on
the LOAD/SAVE vectors from $0300 onwards in the memory. The KERNAL initialization routine resets these to the default
KERNAL routines, disabling the cartridge fastloader. Because JiffyDOS modifies the routines inside the KERNAL, it
doesn't get disabled by this KERNAL initialization routine.
In my youth years I had patched several of my games converting this call to the KERNAL initialization into NOPs, so I
could use my cartridge fastloaders. I had the KCS Power Cartridge and Final Cartridge III back then.
Both are superior to the Epyx Fastload cartridge and especially the FC3 fastloader is a really advanced piece of
technology. It loads a file out-of-order, so it doesn't need to wait until the right sector is under the head and it
has a highly optimized GCR decoding routine intertwined with the serial communication code.
My friend lent me an Epyx Fastload cartridge in 1985 and it made a massive difference for the load times on my 1541. I've never heard of Jiffy DOS
That's not surprising. JiffyDOS required minimal hardware changes, both in the drive and in the C64. Specifically, you had to replace a few ROM chips. As easy as that sounds to someone like you or me, it's beyond the abilities of most end users. So the various fastload cartridges (Fastload, Super Snapshot, Warp Speed 5, etc.) were more popular because there was no hardware modification involved. It was so easy, anyone could do it.
I don't have a C64 yet you enthralled me for 16 minutes, great work!
Appreciate the extra videos during this time, much needed. Peace!
Thank you. Watching your video while being quarantined in Poland.
Eventually, fast load code became part of many loading processes for games on the 64, especially if they were from the bigger publishers. Some tape loaders even have their own version. There was a very interesting type-in program in one of those old 8 bit magazines (forget which one) that would allow you to save your code to tape in a special altered forma that would speed it up by many times, to greater than 1541 speeds. The beauty of it was that you didn't need any special code to load the new formatted tape code. Once saved on tape, you just loaded it like any other program except this time it loads 5 or more times faster!
I really miss those old 8 bit magazines and their type in games and utilities (even though often times you'd have to search through your code to find that ONE misplaced character that keeps the whole thing from running!) It was an era I sorely miss, that the clone PC world has never been able to duplicate.
Oh god, Epyx fast load was a GODSEND back in the day. Used to make a huge difference in load times.
Had one in the early 80's, did make a major difference loading most games, wouldn't have a C64 without it
Had the Epyx Fastload for some time, but then I upgraded to the Super Snapshot which was faster in every way. It worked with more games than the Epyx Fastload too. Also, if memory serves me well, if you just hit Commodore-Run Stop it will do LOAD"*",8,1
I had the exact opposite result. It was faster, but it worked with LESS games than the Epyx FastLoad.
I never had the Epyx FastLoad, but I had a Action Replay MK6... that thing was a beast
One thing I found with the Epyx fastloader, is a lot of my games would show different loading screens. konami boot camp, crazy cars, TMNT, all loaded different load screens. It was neat!
When I had my Commodore 64 I had a fast loader call vorpal fast loader. I found this on a Google search. The Epyx Fast Load is a floppy disk fast loader cartridge made by American software company Epyx in 1984 for the Commodore 64 home computer. It was programmed by Epyx employee Scott Nelson, who was originally a programmer for Starpath and later designed the Epyx Vorpal fastloading system for the company's games.
Fast load was pretty awesome at the time. I think we modded it with a reset button too. C64s crashed a lot and the reset button helped get you back again quicker. Back then we would have "pizza parties" where people would bring boxes full of floppy disks, and trade games. Some folks even had disk duplicating machines with 2 disk drives. Sometimes we needed copy programs like pink panther and fast crackem.
Test with any of the SSI gold-box games such as Pool of Radiance or Curse of the Azure Bonds. They have a fastloader, but allow you a chance to turn their built-in fastloaders off before they start. It'll be a good comparison betwen JiffyDOS, stock, Epyx, and the SSI speed loader. :)
The SSI games were so soul crushingly slow.
Good tip, thanks! I'll need to do that. Need to check my original game collection.
@@KingMob4313 True, but i played them all, I spent a long time at the C64 playing Pool of Radiance, Curse, Secret of the Silver Blades & Death Knights of Krynn etc. I still have all the games. The worse part was 4 double sided disks, so there was lots of disk swapping and flipping, as you needed a disk for your save game too.
@@KingMob4313 I've learned that jiffydos makes them remarkably fast, especially if you have a larger storage device; you can copy all the files into one large disk or directory and never swap disks. :)
@@KingMob4313 But so addictive we used to spend hours after school playing these tiles :)
I still have my Fastload cartridge from my youth and I remember that it did load some things faster, but not everything.
I don't know 1/4 of what you are talking about, however, I enjoy your testing videos.
The commodore 64 was the first computer I actually purchased. When I purchased mine, it was one of the earlier C64s. I used a C64 for every computer task until I moved on to the Amiga. Nearly all people who had C64's early on, started out with a cassette tape based loading system. It was incredibly slow. By the time people were able to afford the expensive 1541 disk drive, we were starving for any performance increase possible. The 1541 delivered that performance and was much, much easier to use. The Epyx Fastload Cartridge when it came out, was extremely expensive and in the era of some of the most brutal copy protection ever created, a lot of programs would not work with the fastload, if you could afford to purchase one! Very few people I was around at the time ever spent the money on a Fastload cartridge. Almost no one compared disk drive performance with other disk drives, because most of us could not afford more than one computer! If the choice was a fastload cartridge or another box of 5.25 disks, we'd take the box of disks every time. Don't forget we were using modems and the bit rate (baud) of modems was constantly increasing, forcing people to upgrade to new modems regularly. I went from 300bps, to 1200bps, to 2400 bps, to 9600bps to 19200 bps... There was a lot to spend money on with this computer and the fastload cartridge did not make as much difference as things like a new modem or boxes of disks for more software, and back ups of the programs we wrote at the time. The Epyx Fastload Cartridge would have made more of an impact had it came out 2 years earlier. By the time it came out, people were already moving on to other, more capable computers like the Amiga 1000, then the A500/A2000s. By this time, the PC started developing "mass" with all the PC clones that were available. Only businesses dealt with IBM. Everyone else purchased clones for less than half the cost of the IBM PC.
Not only is warp speed fast as hell, but I have never had a conflict with disks that have their own fast loader. i.e. It always transitions gracefully to other fastloaders. I've been lucky enough to have had one since childhood. Bonus: Warp Speed carts also have a C64C128 switch (for use with 128 mode) and reset button. Best cart that existed back in the day IMO.
Yes, it's been under everyone's radar forever. I think it only took a back seat to Epyx Fastload because it came out later.
Another bonus is that in a C64 the 128 switch effectively acts as a disable switch.
Thank you for your effort appreciate it. Take care.
Glad you are well. Thanks for keeping the content coming. We sure need it out here!
The Epyx FastLoad cart was super common in North America. It was readily available, cheap, and worked pretty well. The more advanced SuperSnapShot also has a fast loader and more features then the Epyx cart but was less common and more money. TFW8B FastLoad Reloaded is quite nice too and supports IEC2SD. I use it sometimes though I mostly use Action Replay now.
Adrian, thanks for the videos! They make the anxiety of what's going on a little easier to deal with. Your videos are awesome!!! Stay safe!
I remember the game "Destroyer". It was a real pain without any fastload but was great with Epyx fast load. The best utility I had for the C64 was "VORPAL UTILITIES" which required reformating floppies but was fast as hell.
The real FastLoad cartridge uses a 470nF capacitor as a form of delay. Since the PLA finds itself exposed to an analog signal (a slow ramp), the hysteresis effect on the inputs of the PLA is critical to proper functioning.
See:
Schematics of FastLoad - rr.pokefinder.org/wiki/Epyx_FastLoad
Hysteresis in electronic circuits - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis#Electronic_circuits
As always. Awesome video. Stay safe. Much love and thank you for doing this.
Thank you for continuing to do videos, especially now as it really helps those of us on Lock Down in California thanks to CV19.
My dad bought the Epyx Fastload in 1984 and I still have it. There were plenty of games that used their own disk routines that it simply could not speed up. But it did work with a fair number of programs and most productivity software that we had at the time. It was basically always in the cartridge port for years until I got an Action Replay which had insane speeds, especially when a file was saved with Warp 25. The game I was playing a lot back then was Ultima III and FastLoad didn't do much for it.
The creator of WarpSpeed has discussed those days in detail over on Lemon64. His forum name is AlienTech
Cool! Yeah I can imagine it was disappointing when a game or program used its own slow routines and didn't give you the choice to use alternate ones. I can really imagine how useful these tools were back in the day though -- for the reasons you mentioned.
The reason why it didnt work so well on the Ultima III was because it had its own "dos" that accessed the data on the disk by doing direct block-reads rather than the standard "load a file" process. I wonder if the more modern patch/hacked versions like U4 gold, or the U3 version of thath etc would work with Fastload but than again, they come with their own fastload routines.
@@RickTheGeek Exactly. It was quite common in the early C64 days for companies to use their own routines. I am glad in later years things changed and many more games had good speed loaders or did not interfere with speeder carts. Yeah U3 Gold is for sure better in this department.
@@adriansdigitalbasement At the time the Fastload cart was a must. I didn't know anyone that I traded software with back then that didn't have one. Super useful. It wasn't until I started working with TRS-80 and Apple IIs in High School that I realized just how slow the C64 drives were.
Racer X definitely a big difference between the C64 I had at home and the Apple II at school 😀
I've been waiting for like two days to find out the answer to this!
me tooo
Shoulda installed a Fastload cartridge, you'da only had to wait half a day.
With the Atari 8-bit, if we wanted to load data faster, we just made the drive work better with a DOS supporting it. Like the US Doubler by ICD with SpartaDOS X.
Or the HappyDrive mods [and their clones]. SpartaDOS X is still being developed by Flashjazzcat who has his own TH-cam Channel under the same name.
great video Adrian , my old 64 is still up in the loft but after watching these videos i might go and dig it out . you keep safe to .
Glad to hear you're okay! I'm so worried about family, friends and favorite TH-camrs. Your videos really help me relax me
Like you, I'm new to the C64 scene, in my case being an Apple IIe owner. Playing around with the Easy Flash has been interesting, to say the least.
Great video. Couple things... First, I wish you'd tried the Super Snapshot to see what time it gets as it is a fast load cartridge too. Second, it would be good to type run after loading to make sure it actually loaded properly. I'm super surprised at that Warp Speed one.
Epix Fastload doesn't really do anything tricky, it's just a ROM. It installs itself much like a DOS Wedge. The Commodore 64 Kernal uses the Zero Page for bits of code it needs to run faster, and because of that the code can be changed to wedge in extra code, since the Zero Page is just RAM. The EasyFlash cartridge doesn't need to emulate anything to just put something in ROM space. Where it does something tricky is with replacing an entire kernal, or a snapshot cartridge. Also, large cartridges like Ocean 512K etc, have more than just a ROM, as they need to switch banks, so they tend to have a couple support TTL chips. BTW, I spell kernel wrong, because every manual that Commodore talks about a kernel, they call it kernal, so I guess that's the name of their operating system.
Check out the pinned comment on this video about how the EPYX cart work. It definitely does trickery and non standard things -- and yes the term KERNAL goes back to the Commodore PET in 1977.
An original Fastload. I have one of the clones :) Also working at home, I live by myself and some of my friends are vulnerable and so can't really risk meeting them. So it is a crazy time. But it's time to learn new things I guess.
The EPYX fastload worked great back in the mid-80s for speeding up load times. I would recommend using an early EA title to test the fastloaders. Something along the lines of Archon, Seven Cities of Gold, or M.U.L.E. These titles were VERY slow to load on a stock system and the EPYX cartridge sped them up nicely. I think the EPYX cartridge was popular not only because it came out earlier than many of the others, but it was also relatively inexpensive at the time.
Another one to test is Fast Hack’em fast boot. I used that one for many years until I got a JiffyDOS system. (Although if I remember right, while it’s fast it’s not as fast as JiffyDOS.)
One thing I tried was converting some single file programs with Turbotape, and those loaded faster off a cassette than they did from a plain stock 1541 (or JD 1541 with JiffyDOS switched off). Crunching programs with something like Bit Imploder to make them smaller can also help load speeds, especially when combined with a fast loader.
I liked FastLoad. I can't say I noticed an improved time loading with software, but I appreciated the Wedge features for easy directory listings. Also the built-in machine code editor. Although it had disk copy features, I preferred to use 3rd party software like Fast Hack'em.
I do remember having warp speed at one time. Always thought it was weird looking cartridge as it had a Cinemaware logo on it, but had it had several awesome utility tools like fastloader(obviously), sector editor, Assembly monitor, etc. if my memory serves me right it had a disk copying feature built into it as well.
Thanks for sharing. Take care!
Thanks Adrian for taking my mind off the things all around me atm. Stay safe and thanks for making such interesting videos !
Thank you so much for a short break from covid19. Stay well!
I had a Warp Speed in the 80s. While its better than Fast Load, its had quite a few compatibility issues from memory. I often had to remove it. Also the Warp Speed cart came with a Reset Button, while on the fast load it was a often made mod, but it wasnt stock.
Haven't use GAL and PAL's since the 90s, surely it must be easier to use commonly available CPLD and snall FPGA instead.
Oh wow. I think we may have had Odell Lake at my grade school, running on an Apple II. It's been so long, I'm not even sure, but boy is that name familiar. I know we had Oregon Trail (another MECC title) for that machine for sure.
Thank you for helping keep us sane
I mostly used Ultraload, first from floppy (load Ultraload first, run it and then load the game) and later from an EPROM card. I then switched to something called Starload (or Starloader, I can't remember exactly), because it was slightly faster. I never used a dedicated fastload cartridge back in the days.
Star-Dos. It was I think one of the earliest Final Cartridge type cartridges. I remember the advertising said, besides all the stuff it could do, it made terrible coffee. :) There was also "ICEPIC" which was one of the first freeze devices, it would freeze the memory in the computer, dump it to disk and then you could load and run it later on, without having the cartridge. It took a while to load, I remember because my copy of Bruce Lee was ISEPICed. :)
No problem, see that like when we were sick and played all day.
Ordered the parts to make my own. Now it's time to wait :-)
I'm looking forward to the day when you discover hardware floppy speeders ;) I was involved in the re-issue of the professional DOS/RapiDOS speeder ... loads 250 blocks in 4 seconds :)
Ideally you'll check out the recent follow up project called MeGaLoDOS which attempts to unify a number of hardware speeders ... including those which load a full floppy once and then exclusively work out of RAM (i.e. TurboTrans) ... loading 250 blocks in less than 2 seconds.
Hi, thank you. I think EPYX FASTLOAD is compatible with SD2IEC, does WARP SPEED work good with SD2IEC?
This is one way to become happy about having a couple if gal's on board...
I had a Fastload I bought used from a guy who bought a Mach 5. Then I got a Final Cartridge 3 and bought a Mach 5 with a used C-64. Being an Atarian early in my computing life (my first computer was an atari 800xl) I REALLY hated using floppies on my C-64. :) I had (anecdotally) better luck with Mach 5.
That is the question that remained after the last video.
Thanks for continuing to make videos!
Thank you for all the great videos as usual, and the extra content during these tough times. I had a C64 when I was about 9. My favorite game was Sid Meier's Pirates!. I don't remember anything about fast loaders and some of the other utilities you use, so it is pretty cool to see them in action. Also, shoutout to #8bitdanceparty. The old Mac and PC content is great, too. Thanks again!
Be safe, bro. I wish I could work remotely(
my first "Cartridge" was the "FC III"
and later on the "Action Replay MK6"
Alexander Kurtz I’m using TFC3 at the moment and it looks much like that Warp he showed.
Just found this channel, really great stuff! Thanks and take care!
well time for a massive fastloader test! :-)
Here in the UK disk drives were quite rare most people used tape with a turbo loader
*whispering with an ASMR-like voice* Ultimate 64
Fastload works by overlaying itself in when programs are the standard vectors for load and save, etc. If a program uses its own load routines, the Fastload ROM won't get enabled. I made knock-offs of these back in the day. Cool gadget.
Should have my parts for these early next week. Great to see that it's working with various carts. Kind of off-topic @Adrian: What's the LED matrix "tv" in the background? Is there a video of it?
Stay safe and healthy, brother
Thanks for posting. We need as much distraction as possible.
I have orders in for a good number of the pla20v8 kits. Going to try on a few revisions as well as my SX-64.
just make sure that orders dont ship from Wuhan ; )
@@alerey4363 Shenzhen Hong Kong. But still a good alcohol bath wont hurt none either. 😉 I mean for the chips.
Worked on my sx-64 and the two different C64 boards I tried.
Adrian, you're making me want a C64 and I do not need any more retro computing hardware...
I have to Epyx Fast Loader. It is hit or miss with SOME games. But for the most part, it has always cut times in half or more. I am running it now on a standard, unmodified C64 and no issues.
Another great video as usual
Unintentionally giving us the bird around 3:30! :D
Back in the mid '80s I remember using a fastloader that was a small file on the disk with the filename of an up arrow character. To activate it you'd type load "[up arrow]*filename*",8,1. The screen would slowly fill with garbage characters then clear and the drive would take off and load at the rate of about 3 head steps every 2 seconds. The file was small - about 10 blocks and could simply be copied onto any disk where there was enough free space. I have no idea what it was called though - it was 35 years ago.
Yes, those were software fastloaders. They have two main disadvantages, the first that you have to load them explicitly, which decreases the convenience of them a lot. But their main disadvantage was compatibility: C64 software will assume that it has all of the computer available: There are no provisions in the operating system to divide the memory across several applications in a fair way. Therefore a software fastloader will often try to hide itself in fewer used parts of memory, but there is still a lot of software that will use the memory where the software fastloader tries to hide.
Cartridge fastloaders don't have these disadvantages: They install themselves on power on, no user action required. Because these cartridges only activate their ROM when it is needed, they are able to hide themselves very well from software, they don't use any RAM that be used by software.
The third category are KERNAL fastloaders such as JiffyDOS: These replace the C64 KERNAL. Their advantage over cartridge fastloaders is that they can speed up all disk operations, not just the operation that can be hooked. If software uses SEQ or USR files, those are typically not speed up by cartridges, but are speed up by KERNAL fastloaders.
At 5:26, Adrian got Rick Roll in that little display in up left corner.....Nice work.
Thanks for the upload and trying to keep us all sane ... Time to change the channel name to 'Adrian's Digital Bunker' ☣
If i remember correctly some of the fastloader uses some really smart on the fly compression to get data faster through the cable. This gave some advantages with uncompressed games/programs. But i really don't know the details.
love your videos Adrian - thanks for sharing :)
omg, you are my hero.. thanks for the comment
I suppose that for future purposes you can just save time by doing "Laps" which is the below text (below the time). You could just do another lap for another measure of time :)
Thankfully we've replaced all those long loading times for games on old microcomputers with fifty unskipable company logos. Progress.
Before then it was a splash screen while SafeDisc would verify the copy protection.
I love the game Test Drive, and it was always a bear to load. I don't have any of this equipment, but I wonder how it would do with a fastloader.
I had a Danish fastloader back in the days. I at some time stumbled upon it again - although I'm not totally sure it's the same version (edit: revision there's sure very much similarity on all parameters) - hardware wise with a red and blue button sure. That is also significantly faster than the Epyx - without weird analog (capacitor) tricky like the Epyx.
The first game tested probably does not "load" the other files but reads them sequentially with file I/O which jiffydos also speeds up and all "normal" fast loaders without drive kernel replacement I know of not. I never had jiffydos at the time but the epix before switching to dolpin dos. The epix fastload was the first I encountered which loaded with screen on, jiffydos I did not even know about before GEOS times.
OT: Someone commented on tape loaders. The well known tape loader "turbo tape" which loads with left arrow + L was 10 times faster as normal tape load, floppy disk without fast load only 7 times. Most commercial games on tape used slower loaders, some even with screen on block counter, space invaders during load, music etc.
I created a variant of this turbo tape as "Turbo+" where I made the 1 shorter and the 0 longer than the original on save so the bits can be better distinguished with VIC interference. It had the same speed but you could load the files with screen on. I added a command to toggle if the screen is on during load to be able to load the original format. But that was quite late so it did not spread I think.
The "magic" tool mentioned which allows you to load games from tape without a special loader just writes a stripped down autostart turbo tape before saving the actual saved file in turbo tape format. At least the one I dissassembled before I even had a floppy disk drive to get at the saved program and the fast loader as it also started the loaded program. Some 3rd party casette recorders had a speaker so you could hear and distinguish the loaders. As disks were expensive I used tapes much longer to "archive" files. I also wrote a menu program where you could input the time or tape counter of my tape (do not remember exactly) which then switched off the tape motor at the approximate position of the desired file during fast forward.