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Commodore 1570/1571


cbm/drives/1571.gif
With the release of the Commodore 128 personal computer, Commodore decided finally to design the serial I/O right. Drives sped up, gained significant new features, and soared ahead of the pack where they had previously been trailing way behind. The 1570/1571 disk drives are exceptional in the fact that they are capable of reading both MFM (PC-style) and GCR (Commodore style) formatted disks. This made them ideal not only for the numerous disk formats found in the CP/M operating systems world, but ideal for Commodore folks who wanted to share data with Pee-Cees.

Commodore also carefully considered the backwards compatibility they promised with the Commodore 128 computer. If the Commodore 128 was to be "3 Computers in 1", could it's disk drive be any less? So, in addition to the high speed/high capacity "1571 mode", and the variable format "MFM" capabilities mentioned above, the Commodore 1571 was capable of a Commodore 1541 emulation mode, allowing it to load and run all the old Commodore 64 software.

Like all Commodore disk drives, these drives were "smart" devices. They included their own processor, their own memory, and their own disk operating system. In fact, the relationship between a Commodore computer and it's disk drive resembles more closely two computers on a network than a typical Computer->peripheral relationship. The peripherals on the Commodore serial "network" each had a unique identifying "Unit" number, typically ranging from 8-30. This number identified which physical device was being accessed. When a disk drive contained more than one floppy drive (like the 1572 for instance), you also had to refer to the particular "drive" number you wanted (typically 0 or 1). Single-floppy drives, like the ones on this page, still had to deal with the legacy of the old IEEE-488 dual drives and the version of CBM DOS with which they were compatible by referring to their single floppy as "drive 0".



cbm/serialdrives/1570.gif

Model    : 1570
Type     : 5.25" Floppy Disk
Media    : Single Sided, Double Density
Capacity : 170K per disk
Interface: CBM Serial Bus
Dos      : CBM DOS 3.0
Notes    : GCR "burst" only, "1541" emulation, Demo disk


cbm/drives/1571.gif

Model    : 1571
Type     : 5.25" Floppy Disk
Media    : Double Sided, Double Density
Capacity : 360K per disk
Interface: CBM Serial Bus
Dos      : CBM DOS 3.0
Notes    : MFM, GCR "burst", GCR "1541" emulation, Demo disk




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