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The 1541 was set to be a highly capable and performant machine, but an interface/design bug held it back and delivered dismal performance whenever connected to the C64. They tried to fix it but it couldn't be rescued, so speed freaks needed to wait for the 1570 series.

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It was partially rescued by fastloaders and later JiffyDOS. Fastloaders tended to max out at 10-13x if the disk format was unchanged but if you could reformat or recode the files you could go anywhere from 25x speed to over 40x (transwarp) on stock hardware. DolphinDOS gave a 25x speed up by using the parallel port with 1541.

Epyx games used the Vorpal format which gave 15x load speedup.

The point is, the speed issues weren’t really the 1541’s fault although GCR coding could have benefited from a HW decoder.

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