re: #213 dragonath

The point of fastload was that …
look, half way through designing the c64, Tramiel or someone fired the engineers

So the machine HAD a chip to run the floppy but they couldn’t figure out how to get it working, so instead they kernalled the CPU to directly read the stream of data. But with the CPU being stalled periodically for the video chip it couldn’t read the stream full speed. I think it was something like 3 rotations of the disk to read one sector.

So the fastload cart turned off the screen so you could read the disk at a more reasonable speed.

There was a mod by someone who understood the disk chip that was sitting there unused. By putting in a few wires or something, you could get reasonable disk access without turning off the screen.