Since then someone has come up with yet another custom disk loader that's more than twice as fast as that one!
https://csdb.dk/release/?id=197710
It's incredible that people are still pushing the limits of the stock C64 system these days...
It's staggering to think that such a thing is possible on the stock hardware, just as it is staggering to consider that 1024 colors on a stock IBM PC with CGA is possible as the 8088 MHz demo has proven. What would have happened if an IBM engineer in 1981, or Commodore KERNAL developer in 1982, had had the necessary insights to come up with such innovations? CGA and the early IBM PC's reputations as a poor computer for games would not have come to pass. The C64 and 1541 would have been viable for things other than games.
Of course, the PC standard took over the world despite CGA's four garish colors. Of course, the 64 was the dominant home computer of the 1980s regardless of the need for a third-party fast loader. But one can't help but wonder what more could have been done.
https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born
I have no words... These coders are amazing!
One of the absolute highlights (timestamp https://youtu.be/_1jXExwse08?t=1903) was the incredible work on a custom disk loader that increased the throughput from 400 bytes/s to 7.5 kB/s! A writeup of that optimisation work, which was only published in 2013, can be found here: https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/gcr-decoding/index....