The Commodore 1581 is a 3½ inch double sided double density floppy disk drive made by Commodore Business Machines (CBM) primarily for its C64 and C128 home/personal computers. The drive stores 800 kilobytes using an MFM format different from both MS-DOS (720 KB), and the Amiga (880 KB) formats. It was released in the summer of 1987 and quickly became popular with bulletin board system (BBS) operators and other users.
Like the 1541 and 1571, the 1...
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The Commodore 1581 is a 3½ inch double sided double density floppy disk drive made by Commodore Business Machines (CBM) primarily for its C64 and C128 home/personal computers. The drive stores 800 kilobytes using an MFM format different from both MS-DOS (720 KB), and the Amiga (880 KB) formats. It was released in the summer of 1987 and quickly became popular with bulletin board system (BBS) operators and other users.
Like the 1541 and 1571, the 1581 has an on board MOS Technology 6502 CPU with its own ROM and RAM, and uses a serial version of the IEEE-488 interface. Inexplicably, the drive's ROM contains commands for parallel use, although no parallel interface was available. Like the 1571, it can read various other disk formats using special software. This capability was most frequently used to read MS-DOS disks. However, unlike the 1571, which is nearly 100% backward-compatible with the 1541, the 1581 has limited compatibility with Commodore's earlier drives. Although it responds to...
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