VC1540

The VC1540 is a 5.25-inch floppy disk drive for the VC20 home computer from Commodore . Together with this it formed the first computer system with floppy for less than 1000 US dollars. The floppy was first shipped in November 1980. The German introductory price at the time was DM 1898.00 (approx. EUR 970.00). The VC 1540 is the German version of the American VIC 1540.

The 1540 has only one read / write head and can therefore only write to diskettes on one side. The capacity is 166 KB.

Floppy disks that were sold as single-sided were also coated on the back with a magnetizable surface. You could put such floppy disks upside down in the drive and write a further 166 KB. To do this, however, it was necessary to cut a small notch in the floppy disk to deactivate the write protection. The trade sold suitable punching devices, so-called disk punches .

Like most Commodore floppy drives, the 1540 is a stand-alone computer with an integrated Commodore DOS .

The 1540 was the predecessor of the VC1541 intended for the C64 . In fact, the first 1541 (with the so-called "long board") were nothing more than 1540 with slightly modified DOS.

The 1541 was even somewhat slower in data transmission than the 1540, because the C64, due to the direct access of its graphics chip to the main memory, could not keep the data rate of the 1540 intended for the VC20. Conversely, the VC1541 ran smoothly on the VC20. The firmware of the VC1540 drive was faulty and the signal transmission was too fast for the C64, so that you could only get data from this drive to the C64 with a few tricks.

When the demand for the C64 exploded from 1982 onwards, there were supply bottlenecks for the associated VC1541. Because many 1540s were still in stock, quite a few were converted to the status of the 1541 drive by replacing the EPROM . They are labeled "1540" on the case, but are fully fledged 1541s.

VC1540

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