> Unless you're Dave's drinking buddy and there's beer on the table, that specific wording may be just a little bit harsh
Yeah, maybe, sorry if it came across like that. We use the term "I call BS on that!" very colloquially and loosely here, so I didn't think of it as being offensive. I could have worded that better, I agree.
> "Although it’s impossible to write to ROM, Commodore left out the circuitry in the 1541"
There is no "circuitry" to disable writing to ROM. ROM chips have no r/W pin, so no circuitry could attach to that. The only thing I could imagine is that they "forgot" the circuitry to disable the ROM's outputs when a write was issued. In that case, the CPU and the ROM write to the data bus at the same time. Which would totally garble whatever it is that is on the bus (which doesn't matter, since the write would be lost anyway), and maybe send a few more milliamps through the processor's (or the ROM's) data lines, but I doubt that this would be much more than what those pins are designed to handle in the first place.
One fact though is that the RAM chips they used back then were often very low quality (because they had trouble sourcing the amount they needed to keep up with the demand), and these RAM chips just broke at some point.... Watch any YouTube video about a C64 repair, and you will notice that everyone just complains about those chips. But that is a different issue and wouldn't explain the ROM chips breaking, or why the issue happens because of "writing to ROM"...
Yeah, maybe, sorry if it came across like that. We use the term "I call BS on that!" very colloquially and loosely here, so I didn't think of it as being offensive. I could have worded that better, I agree.
> "Although it’s impossible to write to ROM, Commodore left out the circuitry in the 1541"
There is no "circuitry" to disable writing to ROM. ROM chips have no r/W pin, so no circuitry could attach to that. The only thing I could imagine is that they "forgot" the circuitry to disable the ROM's outputs when a write was issued. In that case, the CPU and the ROM write to the data bus at the same time. Which would totally garble whatever it is that is on the bus (which doesn't matter, since the write would be lost anyway), and maybe send a few more milliamps through the processor's (or the ROM's) data lines, but I doubt that this would be much more than what those pins are designed to handle in the first place.
One fact though is that the RAM chips they used back then were often very low quality (because they had trouble sourcing the amount they needed to keep up with the demand), and these RAM chips just broke at some point.... Watch any YouTube video about a C64 repair, and you will notice that everyone just complains about those chips. But that is a different issue and wouldn't explain the ROM chips breaking, or why the issue happens because of "writing to ROM"...