8-bitters and multi-whatever

[Ethan Dicks]

On 9/12/07, Roy J. Tellason <rtellason at verizon.net> wrote:
> On Wednesday 12 September 2007 15:38, Ethan Dicks wrote:
> > > > Just a passive cable?  Do you have any special notes, or was it just
> > > > SAVE "FOO", 1  and LOAD "FOO", 1?
> > >
> > > I was wondering if you'd want the ",1" in there or not myself.
> >
> > In this case, the '1' is to designate cassette drive 1 (PETs have two,
> > C-64s have one).  It's probably optional, but I included it out of
> > habit.
>
> Actually I never did all that much with cassette on any c= stuff (though I do
> have one),  and never thought about there being two of them attached to one
> machine...

The C-64 does not have a device at address 2, IIRC.  Original PETs
used 1 as the internal (keyboard mounted) cassette, and 2 as the
external cassette.  Later PETs swapped that, with 1 accessible from
the rear port, and 2 only accessible if you opened the case.

Few folks had two datasette drives on a PET, if for no other reason,
because the drives were originally $70-$100 each.  It _would_ have
been handy for me to have two tape drives, but only because I did
everything on that PET with tape (which has since been converted to
tape files and disk images and I can still fire up with VICE).

> Too often I typed that ,1 in when executing a disk command,  and there were
> times when that wasn't wanted or necessary,  and didn't work like I expected.

*Nods*  Yep... that was a huge shift for me when moving from the PET
to the C-64 - getting used to appending ",8" to everything.

-ethan