Exploring Epyx Fast Load for the Commodore 64

The standard speed gives you that relaxing, ASMR sound from the drive, like the Sears cash registers in the 80's.

Robin is there a way to rename, lock, unlock, etc. without the FastLoad cartridge? Is this possible with just the computer?

Does the DOS Wedge support commands to devices other than 8? I know that The Final Cartridge 3 and JiffyDOS both support changing what drive is being targeted by the DOS Wedge, but haven't found anything about similar functionality on the Fast Load cart.

I had one of these. It wasn’t very compatible with certain disk protections, so it had to be disabled prior to loading such software. Once disabled, it can be reenabled by typing SYS 57194.

I got a heap of c64s at least 4 of them and a heap of drives and an sx-64 years ago for about $150AUD it had this cartridge, but in my time as a teen I had Action Replay MK III . Speaking of the Advert wasn't there one with someone near the screen and a skeleton and cobwebs on them? and a similar thing they died waiting for the program to load.

One major feature not mentioned: It was one of the very few software fast loaders not blanking the screen. It would have been more obvious if you would have used a game which shows a loading screen. Like a lot of mastertronic tapes game copyied to disk by a "parameter" tool. I used to buy games on tape because the tape games were often 5 or 10 DM cheaper as disk games and then used freezer or parameter copy tools to play them from disk.

BTW / half off topic: I made a turbo tape clone which could load without the screen banking. I just made the one bits shorter and the zero bits longer on save and added a command to disable screen blanking for loading. Of course it could only load files with screen unblanked which were saved with it, but the files saved with it could be loaded with any turbo tape clone. As a listing of a british c64 magazine I also found a tape speeder allowing to load with screen on which used the load/save vectors instead of arrow commands but it was not TT compatible and a little slower. But not as slow as most commercial built in game loaders. In the early days I used to backup programs on tape with turbo tape while disks were expensive.

Off topic - suggestion: Later I had Dolphin Dos, which could use Tracks 36-40. I found that other hardware speeders also had such features but were not compatible because e.g. the densitiy settings for the additional tracks (or a flag indicating the 40 track usage?) were not the same. This would be an interesting topic for a video, and also if it would be possible to change the density settings for the other tracks to increase disk capacity. I wonder which densities would phyiscally work... At least track 18 should stay as it is so directory listing is still possible without a modified drive rom or software.

I had an unofficial dual cartridge with Fastload and Fastload 2 on the same circuit board, with a switch. Later I had placed that INSIDE the C64 case, I connected the PCB edge lines to the cartridge connector's soldering points with wires, and I applied a tri-state switch on the case, and a reset button, looked very good. And worked well, of course, I loved it. When I wanted to insert a separate cartridge (usually a freezer) then I set the switch to the neutral position, disabling Fastload, and it worked. I had probably a fully unique C64 this way, a first generation machine with internal Fastloads.

I'm always terrible at reading manuals - I'm certain I didn't know the order of turning things oof. In my house, these things were probably almost never turned off.
I loved my FastLoad. It always always amusing how territorial people were with their fastloader cartridge selection.

I definitely prefer the white text on the blue background. It must be my tired, old eyes. Cheers from Ottawa :-)

I've got a fast load cart but it makes the colors look kind of weird, don't know what's wrong with it.

IIRC, $40 CAN was about $29.60 USD based on a .74 exchange rate.

I can't believe I never knew the commodore runstop thing!

Amazing video. These videos are extremely educational and will help future generations to learn and use 80's computers.

lol Canadian Tire you're killing me....this is for real though buying computer components at the hardware store...I bet I got a few genesis games there back in the day

Thank you for explaining the fastload cartridge. Now I know what functions it has.

Most people don't realize that the fastload cartridge was used on the space shuttle and its ROM and chips are embedded in the fastest video cards made today to enable them to load from 1541 disks at lightning speed.. Plus every fastload cartridge is fully compatible with elvis 8 tracks... and we know how women like elvis... so go to a bar.. pull out your elvis 8track..show them your fastload cartridge... then say to them... " i want to poke 53280,0 you".. then watch their panties drop..... worst thing that can happen is they slap the crap out of you... but if you find that special girl that says "I want to poke 53281,0 you"... then that's the girl you marry!

That copy writer has clearly never seen a hippo run. Those hell spawned river cows are fast, and angry

It is a mystery to me how they screwed up the 1541 so badly that softare fastloaders (like the one generated by The Final Cartridge III) could achieve as much as 20x speedup - without the need for any additional hardware! The freeze states generated by the FCIII did not need the cartridge to load - much less a special floppy cable. How the frog did they get it that wrong??

I remember the ad of a frustrated guy and it calling the 1541 a "Lumbering Hippo"...this cartridge was so required after I got it...used it until I sold my C64 for an Amiga 2000.

Very thorough, thanks!

My earliest computing memory is from I believe 3rd or 4th grade, and was a C64. The school also had an Apple 2E, but everybody wanted to play games on the C64 because it was so much better because of the color graphics.
I also remember a year or two later programming my name in LOGO, but I don't remember what machine we used. Maybe someone here has an idea. This would have been around 1988-1990.

It's been a looong time since I've been anywhere near a physical C64 yet I watch all of your videos with interest. Keep 'em coming Robin!

God I LOVED my fastload cartridge! From the DOS wedge to the fast loading routines that sped up 90% of my pirated games, it never left my cartridge slot. There were very few games I used GO64 for, even most games with their own fastloader routines (Legacy of the Ancients, most other EOA games) still worked under the fastloader routines. Best thing Epyx ever made, even over Jumpman or Gateway to Apshai.

Fast Hack 'Em by Mike J. Henry. When I was working at Electronic Arts Canada and went to speak with Mike who was employed by them and thank him as an inspiration along with a friend of mine, he was VERY unwilling to talk to us about it......I wonder why....

"Fun" fact: (from Wikipedia)
Hippos usually trot to move quickly on land and can gallop at 30 km/h (19 mph) when needed. They are incapable of jumping but can walk up steep banks.[35] Despite their rounded appearance, hippos have little fat.
...
The hippo is considered to be extremely aggressive and has frequently been reported charging and attacking boats.[90] Small boats can easily be capsized by hippos and passengers can be injured or killed by the animals, or drown in the water. In one 2014 case in Niger, a boat was capsized by a hippo and 13 people were killed.[91] Hippos will often raid farm crops if the opportunity arises, and humans may come into conflict with them on these occasions. These encounters can be fatal to either humans or hippos.[92]

I had an Epyx Fast Load for my C64, It was great for cracked games, but I was disappointed to learn that it didn't do much for most original copies. I seem to recall that my copy of Ghostbusters, which was in two files (a small loader and the main program), didn't work with Fast Load. At the time, I figured out what the problem was and fixed it, but I don't remember what I did now. I also used it to crack the game Suicide Strike. Again, I don't remember how I did it, beyond the fact that I used the ML monitor for it.

Later on, I got a Super Snapshot cartridge and that replaced the Fast Load. It was faster and had many more functions.

Fun fact: Hippos are super fast. A hippo can easily run up to 30 km/h (18.6 mph). This is faster than many human beings can run. The world record for human beings is 44.72 km/h (27.8 mph) but that's only possible over a very short distance. If I'd ask you to please run around the block, you'll probably going around 8-12 km/h (5-7.5 mph). If I ask you to run as fast as you can, you might get up to an average of 20 km/h (12.4 mph) but even then a hippo would still easily overtake you. That's why you cannot really outrun hippos. If you get attacked by one, outrunning is your worst option and might actually be fatal. Unless you can climb on anything, your best options are making a lot of noise or curling up in a ball and play dead. Every year more people die worldwide from hippo attacks than from lion, wolf, shark, and elephant attacks combined.

Also hippos can swim at 8 km/h (5 mph) for an extended period of time. Competitive swimmers can swim at 7-11 km/h (4.3-6.8 mph) but not for an extended period of time. The world record for swimming is 19.8 km/h (2.3 mph) but again, that's very exceptional. Normal people can swim at speed of around 3-7 km/h (1.9-4.3 mph). So most likely you also have no chance to outswim a hippo.

Would that would be $113 today if it was US dollars, not sure of about how much the Canadian exchange rate would be. So somewhat less than $113USD.

Congrats on 1K subs..

cool. white text ftw

Is it possible to stop directory listing or they forgot to implement this?

I really gotta get back into emulation again....:/ What a trip down memory lane.
I always likes manufactures telling you "There is no need to remove the FastLoad cartridge once inserted."

Ya. (except when you need to use another one) lol
I think its probably just "We want you to always you our product on everything, that's is why you bought it"

Completely no oversight over that : some games don't wort with fastloaders. I can't even remember if this had a 'disabled' switch... i guess it does??

I often think this is more of an oversell, like all manufactures back in the day..But when it comes down to the wire, not everything will work. but they won't tell you that because its up for the user to know ...????? I never understood that bit, as if they except everyone using a FastLoad would be smart enough to dig and see which game used what..

I had SpeedDOS hardware extension, they went the way of doing parallel transfers, so you had to modify your 1541 and the C64 with new eeprom-chips and soldering the parallel-cable to the 1541 and then plug it into the expansion-port. But looking at c64-wiki this seems to be a german solution to this problem so perhaps this was only available here...

I find that the inclusive memory addressing on the Fast-Load is more logical than on other monitors... that's just how my mind works, including last specified byte. heh

I haven't used the C64 in a long time, but I still have the computer and everything I was using at the time. I used the Snapshot cartridge, and really liked it. I have Jim Butterfield's book on Machine language Programming, and have forgotten everything I knew. Good memories.

Anyone notice how this cartridge reeks havoc with SAM for some reason? It softlocks after loading into high ram...

How van it load disks fast if the diskdrive wasn’t designed to be fast in the first place???
I know tha C64 doesn’t blank in disk mode but does purposly get blank in dataset mode,
Now i can imagine that in order to load disks fast,you should use a vic20 diskdrive and then use a fast load cartride to load the C64 with it’s own dxternal os system then force the C64 to go blank into disk mode to load data from disks faster into the C64,so in theory a vic20 diskdrive should be compatible on the C64 by forcing in to go blank into disk mode trough that fast loader software,but i cannot imagine otherwise,
Because i heard that the vic20 diskdrive is faster then the C64 diskdrive.

Still an underrated channel :)

The Excelerator + Plus floppy drive for the commodore 64 was much better and faster than the 1541 disk drive.

JiffyDOS took some of the RAM that software needed. I used the MultiPlan spreadsheet, and I had calculation errors because of RAM conflicts.

Is it bad to leave cartridges plugged in? Will the connection to the cartridge contact become stretched?

Great video! Very informative.

The Directory feature alone makes this worth owning. You can view the contents of any disk when the $ command doesn’t work. Lots of games I didn’t know about on those disks….

you came a long way since those 1k sub

Just found this video. I have been investigating the 1541 for a few days now. The more advanced dos commands and of course fast-loaders. Next thing will be to try to execute some code within the 1541. Really good explanations. Thank you!

Fun video, such fond memories. I had/pref the Mach-5 cartridge. Funfact, it wasn't compatible with downloading/transferring data over the modem...had a fun time debugging that as a youth :)

1000 subscribers! And now you have 55.6k, that's 1024 × 55.6 = 56934.4 'bites' of the 🍏. 🐖s can't fly, and neither can Emus. The Tasmanian emu is now extinct - I guess they must have had a massive hunt! ⚛

Who would put a C128D sideways on the table? lol Great Video anyways, enjoyed it!