Krill has given us Transwarp, a special 1541 loader that is able to push the speed of loading a file from the 1541 drive far beyond the limits that hardware-modified systems reached. And it requires no special hardware. With a little bit of prep, I was able to test it with CBM Disk Transfer Benchmark.

How fast is it? Think of it this way: Back in the day, you could spend a bunch of money and open up your C64 and 1541 drives and install DolphinDOS to achieve a load speed that clocked in at 23 times faster than the stock hardware. JiffyDOS, which was easier to install and more ubiquitous, could only provide you with a 9x load time improvement over the base hardware. Transwarp is capable of loading files 40 times faster than the stock system, and requires no hardware modifications or cartridge.

This is impressive and totally legitimate. The 1541 and C64, which gave us a measly 403 bytes per second transfer rate when loading files, can be pushed to do the same loading task at 16,056 bytes per second! And all in software!

Not to put too fine a point on it, but here’s another way to look at it: the stock 1541 with C64 takes a almost two minutes (1:51.5) to load a 177 block file. Transwarp can load that file in three (0:02.8) seconds. (And did I mention it doesn’t require any hardware changes?)

Note that Transwarp can actually achieve up to 50x the load speeds when file overhead is excluded. The 40x score is as timed by Disk Transfer Benchmark with its 177 block data file from within DTB and includes all of the time it takes to JSR into LOAD and return.

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