Epyx FastLoad

The Epyx FastLoad is a floppy disk fast loader cartridge made by American software company Epyx in 1984 for the Commodore 64 (C64) home computer. FastLoad allowed programs to load from the Commodore 1541 disk drive five times faster. It quickly became a very popular peripheral for the hottest selling 8-bit home computer.

Another feature of the FastLoad was a so-called disk wedge: a collection of practical one-or-two-character shortcut commands to access the disk — performing tasks such as loading, saving, and copying files, and formatting disks (some of those commands were notoriously cumbersome in the native mode of Commodore DOS).

FastLoad included a machine language monitor. Although not as full-featured as the typical 4Kbyte monitor, it was instantly accessible and therefore a great convenience.

FastLoad also included a disk editor which displayed raw data from floppy disks in classical HEX-ASCII split screen mode.

In the uncommon case that a software program wouldn't work with FastLoad, the cartridge could be totally switched out of operation via a menu command, thus avoiding the need to physically remove and reinsert the cartridge. The overall quality and transparency of this peripheral made it so easy to use and unobtrusive that many users left the cartridge in continously, never removing it from their C64 in the entire lifetime of the machine.