On the occasion of my new book Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer, I am writing The History of the Commodore 64 in Twelve Objects, posted weekly from November 1st, 2024:
It wasn’t all great. The Commodore 64 came with glaring, everyday gnawing flaws that Commodore never fixed:
- The tape drive was slow.
- After a series of unfortunate events, bugs, bug fixes, workarounds, and last-minute botches in the production process, the C64’s disk drive was not slow, more like glacial.
- C64 BASIC lacked proper commands for dealing with the disk drive, and even seeing the contents of a floppy involved the LOAD “$”,8 command, erasing the current program in memory.
The 1985 Final Cartridge was your solution to these flaws, creating a new tape format, speeding up the disk drive, adding new BASIC commands and utilizing the function keys (F7 to show the floppy directory).
In today’s parlance, Final Cartridge was a monumental quality of life upgrade. You could already do almost everything without the cartridge, but the cartridge made life easier and faster, allowing you to quickly shuffle between disks, make copies, modify programs, or just load games faster.
Final Cartridge’s additional features also accommodated technically minded user:
- A machine code monitor for reading and modifying the program in memory.
- A reset button.
- A “freeze” button (in later iterations) for ostensibly backups, or even saving your game progress in games that lacked suck a function.
- Better printer support.
How could you make the disk drive faster? You might expect that the bottleneck was reading and writing the floppy disk itself, but that was already plenty fast. The bottleneck was communicating the data over the cable between the C64 and the drive. The disk drive could be sped up because the 1541 disk drive is a small computer of its own, and because there are disk commands for sending small programs to the drive. A fast loader like Final Cartridge thus sends a program to the drive with a faster “protocol,” a faster way to send data between computer and drive.
Did the Final Cartridge make the C64 everything it would have been with more development time and a higher price? Perhaps, but there was a joy in plugging in the cartridge for the first time, making your computer faster, nicer, and more enjoyable.
Which cartridge did you use?
Coming Jan 3rd: Object #10 – You are invited to a Demo Party