Who, me? Welcome again to “Who, me?”, The Register’s Monday mess – because it tells readers tales of breaking things.
This week meet “Harvey” who told us a tale from 1986 when he worked for a company that decided Commodore 64 owners deserved a cheaper disk drive than the official model 1541.
Said drive was called the “SuperDrive 2000”* and was sold as being utterly compatible with the Commodore original, and better at a few things too. They were also rather cheaper.
But as Harvey told us, “Of course they weren’t 100 per cent compatible and angry customers sent the devices back.” A lot.
“This lead to a huge problem,” Harvey told us, “because we had a ton of these drives, but couldn’t move them due to compatibility issues.”
Eventually the company’s owner acted: Harvey saw him walk in “with some computer guy who placed on my desk a tube of chips and a Promenade C-64 EEPROM burner.”
You guessed it: Harvey was told to burn legitimate 1541 ROMs into Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM) and then install the EEPROMs into the SuperDrive 2000 disk drive.
“That’s illegal,” Harvey protested, but his boss said everything was fine and he should just get on with things.
So Harvey did and found that “once the copied ROM was placed into the Enhancer, the drive worked 100 per cent like a 1541.”