the issue. Some commentators suggested the bug could be avoided by always explicitly specifying the 0: drive number when saving, though it was later shown that any disk operations without a drive number were sufficient to lead to the bug. The bug stemmed from the fact that the affected DOS implementations were modified versions of the DOS contained in earlier Commodore PET dual drives such as the 8050. This created a "phantom drive 1:" on single-drive systems, resulting in the allocation of an unnecessary buffer under some conditions. Since the Save-with-Replace command used all five drive buffers, and because the method by which the "phantom" buffer was allocated did not meet specifications, this resulted in scrambled data being written to the disk under some conditions. In September 1986, Philip A. Slaymaker published an article describing in great detail the cause of the bug and providing patches to the 1541 drive ROMs; readers with an EPROM burner could produce their own patched ROMs which could be swapped into the drive. Commodore was made aware of Slaymaker's findings, and while they never issued an official update for the original 1541's ROMs, they did fix the bug in Revision 5 of the 1571 ROMs, and also in the ROMs for the 1541-c and 1541-II drives. Although not supported by Commodore, it is known that the 1541-II firmware (but not that of the 1541-c) can also be used in an original 1541 drive by using EPROMs, which will fix the bug for that drive as well. Command channel As previously noted, the Commodore DOS itself is accessed via the "command channel", using syntax like that used to access files. Issuing commands to the DOS and retrieving status and error messages generated in response to commands is accomplished by opening a file to the device using 15 as the secondary address, for example: To retrieve and display the device status, one could code: In the above example, E will hold the error number (if any, it will be zero if no error exists), E$ will be a terse text description of the error, T will represent the disk track where the error occurred, and S will be the sector on track T to which the error refers. If no error exists, the equivalent of will be returned in the four variables. Note that INPUT# is a run mode only verb. Also, in programs that issue