Commodore 64 peripherals

This article is about the various external peripherals of the Commodore 64 home computer. Due to the backwards compatibility of the Commodore 128, most peripherals will work on that system, as well. There's some compatibility with the VIC-20 and PET too.

In the United States, the 1541 floppy disk drive was widespread. By contrast, in Europe, the C64 was often used with cassette tape drives (Datasette), which were much cheaper, but also much slower than floppy drives. The Datasette plugged into a proprietary edge connector on the Commodore 64's motherboard. Standard blank audio cassettes could be used in this drive. Data tapes could be write-protected in the same way as audio cassettes, by punching out a tab on the cassette's top edge.

The Datasette's speed was very slow (about 300 baud). Loading a large program at normal speed could take up to 30 minutes in extreme cases. Many European software developers wrote their own fast tape-loaders which replaced the internal KERNAL code in the C64 and offered loading times more comparable to disk drive speeds. Novaload was perhaps the most popular tape-loader used by British and American software developers. Early versions of Novaload had the ability to play music while a program loaded into memory, and was easily recognizable by its black border and digital bleeping sounds on loading. Other fast-loaders included load screens, displaying computer artwork while the program loaded. More advanced fast-loaders included minigames for the user to play while the program loaded from cassette. One such minigame fastloader was Invade-a-Load.

Users also had to contend with interference from magnetic fields. Also, not too dissimilar to floppy drive users, the Datasette's read head could become dirty or slip out of alignment. A small screwdriver could be used to align the tape heads, and a few companies capitalized by selling various commercial kits for Datasette head-alignment tuning.

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