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The Final Cartridge III was a popular extension cartridge which was created for the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128, produced by the Dutch company Riska B.V. Home & Personal Computers. It offered a fast loader, increasing the speeds of the disk drive, and a freezer, allowing the program execution to be stopped to be resumed later.
The cartridge featured a "reset" button and a "freeze" button, as well as a LED that indicated whether or not the module was active. The cartridge featured a "Final Kill" option (accessible through the desktop, freezer or BASIC) which disabled the cartridge's functionality and booted the computer to unexpanded state. This was needed as some software, particularly games, were incompatible with fast-loaders; disabling the cartridge meant it never needed to be removed.
One of the unique features of the cartridge was its GUI, even when its usefulness remained quite limited compared to other GUI environments for Commodore 64. Unless RUN/STOP key was held down during power-on or reset, the cartridge presented a graphical WIMP desktop. The graphical look of the desktop was borrowed from AmigaOS 1.x. It was possible to load new GUI-based utilities from disk or tape, though these remained rare. Of the tools in the cartridge ROM, the most useful were a text editor, a disk file management utility, a calculator, and an alarm clock.
A big selling point was the disk and tape turbo feature, which was available for most commands; this accelerated loading things from disk or tape considerably. However, the biggest strength of this particular cartridge for the Commodore 64 lies in the built-in machine code monitor program, which is capable of the widest range of features, such as text and sprite dump, as well as text and sprite editing.
The cartridge provided an extension to the Commodore BASIC, which contained several new BASIC programming aids, such as RENUMBER, and several utility commands, one of the most notable of which was DOS" which can be used to give Commodore DOS commands (e.g. DOS"S0:UNDESIRED FILE to delete a file), read the error status of the drive (plain DOS") or display the disk directory without overwriting the BASIC program in the memory (DOS"$). The BASIC commands also allowed to return to the GUI desktop mode, or start the machine-language monitor.
The freezer feature allowed to save the memory contents to disk to be resumed at later point (this allowed for convenient copying of single-load games, for example). It also allowed the use of some rudimentary game cheating functionality (disabling sprite collision detection, for example), and printing a copy of the screen image to the printer. The freezer also allowed access to the machine-language monitor.
Compute!'s Gazette praised the original Final Cartridge in July 1987 as "an outstanding addition to any Commodore 64 or 128. I can't think of a cartridge which does so many useful things for the average home computerist/programmer". [1]
The Commodore 1541 is a floppy disk drive which was made by Commodore International for the Commodore 64 (C64), Commodore's most popular home computer. The best-known floppy disk drive for the C64, the 1541 is a single-sided 170-kilobyte drive for 5¼" disks. The 1541 directly followed the Commodore 1540.
The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International. It has been listed in the Guinness World Records as the highest-selling single computer model of all time, with independent estimates placing the number sold between 12.5 and 17 million units. Volume production started in early 1982, marketing in August for US$595. Preceded by the VIC-20 and Commodore PET, the C64 took its name from its 64 kilobytes(65,536 bytes) of RAM. With support for multicolor sprites and a custom chip for waveform generation, the C64 could create superior visuals and audio compared to systems without such custom hardware.
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Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single, non-technical user. These computers were a distinct market segment that typically cost much less than business, scientific, or engineering-oriented computers of the time, such as those running CP/M or the IBM PC, and were generally less powerful in terms of memory and expandability. However, a home computer often had better graphics and sound than contemporary business computers. Their most common uses were word processing, playing video games, and programming.
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