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VCF West: The Ultimate Commodore 1541 Drive Talk — Michael Steil

Vintage Computer Federation

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A presentation at Vintage Computer Festival West — August 8, 2021 — (VCF WEST 2021)

00:00 Introduction
00:55 History
04:55 Recording Format
05:35 Tracks
07:40 Sectors
08:15 GCR (Group Coded Recording)
09:35 Sector Format
10:40 Reading a Sector
11:35 Writing a Sector
12:15 Interleave
12:50 File System
15:30 Disk Drive Hardware
18:00 How VIAs are Used
19:50 Software Architecture
21:45 Data Transmission
23:30 Layer 2: Transmission
27:00 Layer 3: Talk / Listen
29:35 Layer 4: Commodore DOS
31:30 Fast Loaders
38:45 Non-standard Formats
40.25 Copy Protection
46:10 Preservation

#vcfwest #vintagecomputerfestival #vintagecomputers #vintagecomputerfederation

20 Comments

@PJBonoVox 5 years ago (edited)

Every time I see this guy I can only think how long it must have taken to just create the presentation, let alone all of the script.

@martinweihrauch9173 4 years ago

Personally, I believe that Michael knows more about the 1541 than most Commodore engineers in the 80s did....

@MarkCarey42 5 years ago

Brilliant. I haven’t even thought about this on thirty five years, and you’ve presented an incredible collection of information that was very hard to learn in the 1980s in plain and concise language and images. Well done!

@HeadCodeMonkey82 4 years ago

I love these talks from Michael Steil, the 50 minutes went by surprisingly quickly!

@Shmbler 5 years ago

I just love these drives. I found the 5.25" DD floppies suprisingly reliable compared to the 3.5" ones. Almost all of my 30+ year old C64 floppies still work flawlessly. And the unique sounds of the drive mechanics remind me of some of my happiest childhood moments at xmas eve. No emulator will ever be able to do this.

@RacerX- 4 years ago

What an awesome presentation. Super informative and very easy to understand. This is a new reference video for those wanting a great overview of the 1541. Nice job!

@fernwood 4 years ago

The most innovative thing I’ve ever seen was a two-drive copy program that loaded into the drive ram. Once loaded you could disconnect your commodore and the application would copy floppies on its own, detecting when new disks were inserted by watching the r/w sensor.

@CoLD.SToRAGE 5 years ago

Wow... super detailed and so thorough.

@dsmogor 1 year ago

I was writing my own fastsavers back in the day and there's still new stuff I've learned from this presentation, absolutely awesome.

@lftkryo 5 years ago

Nice presentation, and thanks for the shoutout!

@thecodeblasters 4 years ago

This talk it's brillant!!

@bozimmerman 5 years ago

Not enough like buttons in youtube for this lecture. Just fantastic!

@FrankenLab 5 years ago

Wow, thanks for all your effort in putting this all together with such great detail and clarity. Clearly a LOT of work went into organizing all these details! THANK YOU!

@marksman1875 2 years ago

I'm late to the party having only just watched this today. Fantastic work Michael! I thought I knew most things about C= disk drives, especially the 1541, but I learned many new things!

@QuaaludeCharlie 2 years ago

Love all of your Talks , Thank you :) QC

@JustWasted3HoursHere 5 years ago

Wow, that's a lot of info. I'm always impressed by how those early engineers figured out how to overcome problems of the day, back when it was necessary to cut corners because RAM and silicon were both extremely expensive.