The
Commodore 1541 and 1541-II
Floppy Disk drives can also be used with current PC's with minor
modifications to the
serial cable and a well-hacked-up enabler utility. An excellent way to make use of your 1541 based files is
Star Commander. It provides an excellent image system.
The drive was amazingly easy to re-
align, should the repetitive knocks against the head-stop caused by copy-protected software
skew its
alignment. Also, the bit-for-bit stand-alone copy was a favorite feature of mine, as I could start two drives on a
nibble copy, disconnect them, connect another drive to keep working on something else, and they could continue copying (I can't remember how this was achieved, though.)
Sidenote: the vent slits on the top of the case of some 1541's were placed just right so that slightly dragging your hand over them (perpendicular to the direction of the slits) produced a really cool, eerie screeching sound. The pitch could be controlled by the amount of pressure from your hand and was also changed depending on the amount of heat that was dissipating through the case at the time.