Tag Archives: warp speed

Four Commodore 64 Utility Cartridges and a 1541 Disk Drive

More speed loaders tested; new page for C64 fast load data

I’ve picked up a few more utility cartridges over the last year and finally got around to playing with them. Using CBM Disk Transfer Benchmark, I’ve compiled transfer rate comparisons for the Mach 5, Better Working Turbo, KCS Power Cartridge, and Final Cartridge III.

I decided it made sense to have a dedicated page for this data, so I’ve put all of my speed loader benchmark data on a dedicated page. It includes tables and graphs.

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The WARP SPEED cartridge from Cinemaware is nice!

“Why limp along on impulse power when you can jump to Warpspeed?”

The Warp Speed cartridge was Cinemaware’s answer to the Epyx Fastload. I can vividly recall reading the advertisements for this cart but I never knew anyone who had one. I finally picked one up and figured it might make an interesting video to explore it.

Of particular interest are the fast I/O benchmarks. Here are the charts from my video. The benchmarking was done with the CBM Disk Transfer Benchmark tool. I’ll update the benchmarks on that page after I finish posting this.

The load speed is a decent showing, but, note the save speed. I think this is the fastest speeder cartridge forĀ saving files that I know of. In order to get faster than this (for save speed), you need to use DolphinDOS.

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