The story of FCopy for the C-64 | Hacker News Reader

The story of FCopy for the C-64

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25 minutes to do a copy? I remember it taking about 45 minutes per disk to do a backup copy.

I also remember having to break out the oscilloscope every time I played F-15 Strike Eagle and Psi-5 Trading Company to re-align the disk head. Until a friend gave me cracked copies, which allowed me to simply play the games. (By that time I had purchased two copies of Psi-5, after the first disk refused to recognise itself as a valid copy!)

Worst copy protection I ever encountered, until Lotus 123 came along.

F-15 Strike Eagle Protection Unlock Keys, in order:

   B C H P B J H H M F K M P P E L

I've been carrying those unlock codes in my memory since 1985 or so. I knew I'd have a chance to use them at least one more time in my life. Thanks. :-)

There are lots of good points to make about the cost/performance attributes of the Commodore 64 and how awesome it was to work and learn on... but it's also true that the 1541 disk drive is up there with the original IBM display adapters in the annals of incompetent engineering.

As a teenager with an Apple II+, I first understood what a genius Steve Wozniak was when I realized that the disk drive on my friend's C64 ran at about the same speed as the Apple's cassette port. The fact that the 1541 was so slow even though it had its own dedicated CPU was just icing on the cake. How'd that happen? Did the engineer at Commodore actually go home and sleep well that night, thinking he'd done a good job?

There were many mistakes made at C=, but engineering wasn't one of them.

I'm fairly certain the serial speed was kept low because of a management decision to keep the drive compatible with some earlier C= business gear. The engineers had designed the thing to be much better than it was out of the box.

The drive, and the C64, were both capable of running the serial port at a much higher speed, (and that's what your fast-load cartridge did....)

I assume it was the usual story; tight deadlines, lack of resources, architectural changes made in the last minute and perhaps management incompetence.

Heh, next time I hear someone talk about how wonderfully optimized all code was back "in the days" and how wasteful we all are now, maybe I'll send them this article, referring to the shipping software on the 1541.

> Back in the 80s, the Commodore C-64 had an intelligent floppy drive, the 1541, i.e. an external unit that had its own CPU and everything.

I remember by the time I got a floppy drive for my C64 it was twice the price of a new C64, $400 vs $200. It was a real luxury item in those days.

Obligatory link to Michael Steil's The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsRRCnque2E

Yeah, the price of floppy drives was insane (bought an Indus for my Atari 400), but it sure made you feel great after using a damn tape drive (I curse you Atari 410).

I remember FCopy and its successors (esp. FCopy++) with fondness from my childhood. In those days many heated discussions arose around which copy program was fastest, most accurate, or, ah, most "useful" when it came to "backing up" games :-)

now, if only someone could finally reveal to me what "hullabaloo mode" did in Fast Lightning, a disk copy program for the Amiga...

I really think we have lost something since those days since a computer you can program cannot be gotten in the under $200 category.

// I suppose somewhere there is an example, but nothing I've seen in a big box store

$200 in (say) 1985 ~= $400 in 2011. You can get a computer you can program for $400, and it will be a lot more capable than a Commodore 64.

That nice an all, but I'm pretty sure a lot of kids could afford the $200 and not the $400. Technology is supposed to be cheaper and not a doubling.

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough? Inflation means that $200 in 1985 is, for most practical purposes, the equivalent of $400 now. Prices now are about double what they were then. Salaries now are about double what they were then. The number of children who could afford $200 then is probably comparable to the number who can afford $400 now.

I get what your saying, but $400 is still a lot of money today for a lot of people including those not in the US. Other consumer electronic devices have dropped in price, but the entry point for a new computer has stratified into price tiers with the sub $200 being ignored.

Even the C64 or Atari 400 were not in the price range of many people. Spreading the entry point for children / teens to become programmers has taken a hit.

Given the down votes, it makes me wonder if people were really concerned with OLPC's goals or just wanted a cute laptop for themselves. We seriously need to fill the low niches so smart, poor children have an opportunity to get into programming and explore like some of us more privileged people did.

Oh, you sure can get a programmable computer for under $200. I've been wanting to get one of these for some time now: http://www.norhtec.com/products/mcjrmx/index.html

With a hard drive, you can use it as a small, efficient and silent home server.

May I suggest Pandaboard[1]? Or if the availability of PandaBoard is an issue, there's the slightly older BeagleBoard xM[2].

[1] http://pandaboard.org/ [2] http://beagleboard.org/hardware-xM

If you're lucky, you can find a low-end netbook on clearance at Best Buy or the like for $199.

Other than that, you do seem to have to go digging online. Deeply.

yep. Before the phone app era, I hoped someone would try to pull a Sinclair, Atari, or Commodore and introduce a cheap computer based on Linux (well, I was hoping one of the BSDs but still) with a HDMI output. Something that could be programmed, surf the web, and play some games. Heck, a box with a JVM and minimum OS (JavaOS at the time) would have been fine.

(Shrug) I can't work up much sympathy for this argument, when I can buy Pentium laptops running Win2K at local hamfests for $50.

So, if your living in an urban area that has a large base of people selling old stuff you are good. If that isn't available to you then you have problems. That leaves out a lot of kids who could have been programmers.

Sorry, not buying it. If you let hardware or software availability stand in your way, you were never going to be a programmer anyway, or at least not a very good one.

Yeah, I guess the world needs ditch diggers too. Cannot let little things like life circumstances get in the way. Maybe we should require all programming tools to be $1,000, that would make sure we only get the best programmers.

I will bet some child who could have been a better programmer than you or I is out there and never will be because of cost, and I think that is a great loss to us all.

Cannot let little things like life circumstances get in the way.

Nope, not ones as trivial as that. "But I can't afford a computer" is a ridiculous excuse, no matter how you spin it. My first computer cost $1500 in 1982 dollars, and we were by no means a wealthy family. If you can't afford a computer today, then you have more pressing concerns, like getting enough to eat.

I was one of the lucky ones, admittedly. John Carmack had to resort to stealing his first Apple II from a computer store. Genius finds a way, I guess.

If you could afford $1,500 in 1982 for a computer for yourself, then your family was well off. There is a level of income you seem to miss above poverty and below what you had. A level where the family was fed and clothed, but $1500 would have been for a car, not a computer. Working the summer or picking can is not going to get to the $1,500.

The thought that stealing is "finding a way", but raising honest kids results in missed opportunities is appalling.

A major takeaway from this story is that among the many innovations we can thank Apple for, one of the largest is finally creating a platform, mechanism, and support framework that allows individual developers the ability to be recompensed for their intellectual creations.

It's also nice to see competition creating variants of it on other platforms as well - so you can get the advantages of both a open platform (Android) and versions of Apple's App Store from Google and Amazon.

Did you comment on the wrong story? I do not understand how you connected a story about the Commodore 64 floppy drive in the 1980s with Apple & Google today.

I'm sensing some kind of rule of technology stories: All stories must be perceived as commentary on contemporary Apple and Google.

First read the entire story. You'll discover that one of the key takeaways is an incredibly talented developer put a lot of effort into creating some very clever and useful software, but was unable to ever sell it for much money, despite putting effort into the process. Of course, to counter my own position, Apple of today would unlikely allow him to sell software that messed around with low-level internals on it's own platform.

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