The ZoomFloppy has always been far too big for me. I had also started some projects in the past with the aim of bringing the whole thing down to a much smaller size.
Why leave out any external device at all and connect the floppy directly to the USB port?
Of course, this could just be an April Fool’s joke…
There are few programs for 80 column cards, and the CP/M cartridge makes no real sense without 80 characters. So what is more obvious than to combine both cards. And then to make the whole thing as big as possible, so that it fits into a cartridge case. So make everything smaller, pack it together and the “Double-80s” was born.
There are a good dozen 80 column expansions for the C64. But only very few of them work together with the CP/M module. The EX-80 Plus from MK Datentechnik is one of them. And this one I rebuilt under difficult conditions.
The Expert cartridge was launched by Trilogic in 1986, and was a very popular expansion. And the Fast Loader was rather secondary… An interesting module, which made a rebuild worthwhile.
The ISEPIC cartridge was one of the first so-called freezer cartridges, which made it possible to take snapshots of one’s games and programs. Among other things, it was possible to save game saves for games where this was not intended. But the extension could do even more…