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Comment by saundby | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

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....)

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