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Commodore 1571
The Commodore 1571 is Commodore's high-end 5¼" floppy disk drive, announced in the summer of 1985. With its double-sided drive mechanism, it has the ability to use double-sided, double-density (DS/DD) floppy disks, storing a total of 360 kB per floppy. It also implemented a "burst mode" that improved transfer speeds, helping address the very slow performance of previous Commodore drives.
Earlier Commodore drives used a custom group coded recording format that stored 170 kB per side of a disk. This made it fairly competitive in terms of storage, but limited it to only reading and writing disks from other Commodore machines. The 1571 was designed to partner with the new Commodore 128 (C128), which introduced support for CP/M. Adding double-density MFM encoding allowed the drive to read and write contemporary CP/M disks (and many others).
In contrast to its single-sided predecessors, the 1541 and the briefly-available 1570, the 1571 can use both sides of the disk at the same time. Previously, users could only use the second side by manually flipping them over. Because flipping the disk also reverses the direction of rotation, the two methods are not interchangeable; disks which had their back side created in a 1541 by flipping them over would have to be flipped in the 1571 too, and the back side of disks written in a 1571 using the native support for two-sided operation could not be read in a 1541.
The 1571 was released to match the Commodore 128, both design-wise and feature-wise. It was announced in the summer of 1985, at the same time as the C128, and became available in quantity later that year. The later C128D had a 1571 drive built into the system unit. A double-sided disk on the 1571 would have a capacity of 340 kB (70 tracks, 1,360 disk blocks of 256 bytes each); as 8 kB are reserved for system use (directory and block availability information) and, under CBM DOS, 2 bytes of each block serve as pointers to the next logical block, 254 x 1,328 = 337,312 B or about 329.4 kB were available for user data. (However, with a program organizing disk storage on its own, all space could be used, e.g. for data disks.)
The 1571 was designed to accommodate the C128's "burst" mode for faster disk access, however the drive cannot use it if connected to older Commodore machines. This mode replaced the slow bit-banging serial routines of the 1541 with a true serial shift register implemented in hardware, thus dramatically increasing the drive speed. Although this originally had been planned when Commodore first switched from the parallel IEEE-488 interface to the CBM-488 custom serial interface, hardware bugs in the VIC-20's 6522 VIA shift register prevented it from working properly.
When connected to a C128, the 1571 would default to double-sided mode, which allowed the drive to read its own 340k disks as well as single-sided 170 kB 1541 disks. If the C128 was switched into C64 mode by typing GO 64 from BASIC, the 1571 will stay in double-sided mode. If C64 mode was activated by holding down the C= key on power-up, the drive would automatically switch to single-sided mode, in which case it is unable to read 340 kB disks (also the default if a 1571 is used with a C64, Plus/4, VIC-20, or PET). A manual command can also be issued from BASIC to switch the 1571 between single and double sided mode. There is also an undocumented command which allows the user to independently control either of the read/write heads of the 1571, making it possible to format both sides of a diskette separate from each other, however the resultant disk cannot be read in a 1541 as it would be spinning in reverse direction when flipped upside down. In the same vein, "flippy" disks created with a 1541 cannot be read on a 1571 with this feature; they must be inserted upside down.
The 1571 is not 100% low-level compatible with the 1541; however, this isn't a problem except in some software that uses advanced copy protections such as the RapidLok system found on MicroProse and Accolade games.
The 1571 was noticeably quieter than its predecessor and tended to run cooler as well, even though, like the 1541, it had an internal power supply (later Commodore drives, like the 1541-II and the 3½" 1581, came with external power supplies). The 1541-II/1581 power supply makes mention of a 1571-II, hinting that Commodore may have intended to release a version of the 1571 with an external power supply. However, no 1571-IIs are known to exist. The embedded OS in the 1571 was CBM DOS V3.0 1571, an improvement over the 1541's V2.6.
Hub AI
Commodore 1571 AI simulator
(@Commodore 1571_simulator)
Commodore 1571
The Commodore 1571 is Commodore's high-end 5¼" floppy disk drive, announced in the summer of 1985. With its double-sided drive mechanism, it has the ability to use double-sided, double-density (DS/DD) floppy disks, storing a total of 360 kB per floppy. It also implemented a "burst mode" that improved transfer speeds, helping address the very slow performance of previous Commodore drives.
Earlier Commodore drives used a custom group coded recording format that stored 170 kB per side of a disk. This made it fairly competitive in terms of storage, but limited it to only reading and writing disks from other Commodore machines. The 1571 was designed to partner with the new Commodore 128 (C128), which introduced support for CP/M. Adding double-density MFM encoding allowed the drive to read and write contemporary CP/M disks (and many others).
In contrast to its single-sided predecessors, the 1541 and the briefly-available 1570, the 1571 can use both sides of the disk at the same time. Previously, users could only use the second side by manually flipping them over. Because flipping the disk also reverses the direction of rotation, the two methods are not interchangeable; disks which had their back side created in a 1541 by flipping them over would have to be flipped in the 1571 too, and the back side of disks written in a 1571 using the native support for two-sided operation could not be read in a 1541.
The 1571 was released to match the Commodore 128, both design-wise and feature-wise. It was announced in the summer of 1985, at the same time as the C128, and became available in quantity later that year. The later C128D had a 1571 drive built into the system unit. A double-sided disk on the 1571 would have a capacity of 340 kB (70 tracks, 1,360 disk blocks of 256 bytes each); as 8 kB are reserved for system use (directory and block availability information) and, under CBM DOS, 2 bytes of each block serve as pointers to the next logical block, 254 x 1,328 = 337,312 B or about 329.4 kB were available for user data. (However, with a program organizing disk storage on its own, all space could be used, e.g. for data disks.)
The 1571 was designed to accommodate the C128's "burst" mode for faster disk access, however the drive cannot use it if connected to older Commodore machines. This mode replaced the slow bit-banging serial routines of the 1541 with a true serial shift register implemented in hardware, thus dramatically increasing the drive speed. Although this originally had been planned when Commodore first switched from the parallel IEEE-488 interface to the CBM-488 custom serial interface, hardware bugs in the VIC-20's 6522 VIA shift register prevented it from working properly.
When connected to a C128, the 1571 would default to double-sided mode, which allowed the drive to read its own 340k disks as well as single-sided 170 kB 1541 disks. If the C128 was switched into C64 mode by typing GO 64 from BASIC, the 1571 will stay in double-sided mode. If C64 mode was activated by holding down the C= key on power-up, the drive would automatically switch to single-sided mode, in which case it is unable to read 340 kB disks (also the default if a 1571 is used with a C64, Plus/4, VIC-20, or PET). A manual command can also be issued from BASIC to switch the 1571 between single and double sided mode. There is also an undocumented command which allows the user to independently control either of the read/write heads of the 1571, making it possible to format both sides of a diskette separate from each other, however the resultant disk cannot be read in a 1541 as it would be spinning in reverse direction when flipped upside down. In the same vein, "flippy" disks created with a 1541 cannot be read on a 1571 with this feature; they must be inserted upside down.
The 1571 is not 100% low-level compatible with the 1541; however, this isn't a problem except in some software that uses advanced copy protections such as the RapidLok system found on MicroProse and Accolade games.
The 1571 was noticeably quieter than its predecessor and tended to run cooler as well, even though, like the 1541, it had an internal power supply (later Commodore drives, like the 1541-II and the 3½" 1581, came with external power supplies). The 1541-II/1581 power supply makes mention of a 1571-II, hinting that Commodore may have intended to release a version of the 1571 with an external power supply. However, no 1571-IIs are known to exist. The embedded OS in the 1571 was CBM DOS V3.0 1571, an improvement over the 1541's V2.6.