REU Software Support
Very little software made use of the REUs. Like other add-on products from Commodore, their relatively small installed base relative to the huge installed base of the C64 made software developers hesitant to invest much time and effort in supporting it, and the lack of commercial support kept sales lower than they otherwise might have been.
The REUs came with software to utilize the extra memory as a RAM disk, but the RAM disk's compatibility with commercial software was spotty, as some commercial software relied heavily on various quirks of the Commodore 1541 floppy drive. Additionally, many commercial programs simply overwrote the memory space occupied by the RAM disk software.
The GEOS operating system had built in support for the REU as a RAM disk, as did the C128's version of CP/M, and some disk copy programs used the REU to facilitate high-speed copying with a single disk drive. GEOS as well as other programs even used the REU for quick memory transfers within the host machine's main memory by storing a memory block into the REU and then fetching it back to another location. Using this method, only the actual data to be transferred needed to travel on the machine's data bus—unlike the ordinary method, which had the computer's CPU do the transfer, thus spending at least three quarters of the bus capacity on instruction fetches and only one quarter or less on payload data.
Due to its high speed relative to Commodore's floppy drives or even the commercially available hard drives, the REU also became popular with BBS operators.
Read more about this topic: Commodore REU
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