Posted By
George
on 2011-01-12
07:09:04
 |  Mass-Storage for Plus/4
i am thinking about connecting my Plus/4 with my PC. Workling with the Floppy is not real pleasure.
What is state of the Art today?
SD2IEC or should i better use a X-Cable? Does the X-Cable work with Windows?
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Posted By
TLC
on 2011-01-12
09:32:00
| Re: Mass-Storage for Plus/4
If you ask me, then the answer is "both"...
Obtaining a recent version of sd2iec helps you keeping your files on an SD card (...you won't have to be dealing with floppies, at all, then...). Problem: the device is not a true floppy-drive replacement (it doesn't really emulate the floppy drive); you'll have problems with most programs that rely on fastloaders (or copy protection schemes). One possible way to overcome that: buy a 1541Ultimate, which is sort of similar in function (...actually, emulating a 1541 is just one of its features), but emulates the drive on the "hardware level".
With some of these "X*"-cables, you can transfer data to/from a real Commodore floppy drive. In general, the XM1541 and XA1541 cables "do" work for multitasking environments (Windows and Linux), provided that your machine has a parallel port, and you install OpenCBM (and optionally a GUI for that). The original X1541 cable doesn't work with recent (...say, past 10-15 years) parallel ports, and cables before the XM1541 (XE1541 and before) won't work in multitasking environments. The most recent news is Nate Lawson's XUM1541 a.k.a. ZoomFloppy (see other topic) which is USB based ie. steps away from using parallel ports + critical timings.
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Posted By
George
on 2011-01-12
10:50:19
| Re: Mass-Storage for Plus/4
if i understand you right, the X-Cables can only be used to transfer Datas to/from the floppy.
Is it possible to hook up the Plus/4 directly to the PC? So that the Pc is the virtual "Floppy". Can this be done with a X*Cable? If Not, any other solutions?
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Posted By
MikeZ
on 2011-01-12
12:11:06
 | Re: Mass-Storage for Plus/4
Two possibilities for a direct PC to plus4 connection are:
The uEIC-SD from the same source as mentioned in the zoomfloppy thread.
The C64TPC which is described at http://www.spaciousmind.com/html/commodore_c64tpc.html.
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Posted By
TLC
on 2011-01-12
13:10:34
| Re: Mass-Storage for Plus/4
I've never experimented with programs like that. One single program's name comes to mind: Nicholas Coplin's 64HDD (which is a commercial project; though, the basic version is distributed as "freeware", you can download it from the project site: http://www.64hdd.com ).
Comment: the code needs to be run under plain DOS, exclusively. There's a distribution that comes installed together with FreeDOS, on a bootable CD image.
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Posted By
George
on 2011-01-12
14:11:07
| Re: Mass-Storage for Plus/4
64hdd comes closest to the solution i want.
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Posted By
TLC
on 2011-01-12
14:29:33
| Re: Mass-Storage for Plus/4
You could possibly also give a try to 1541EMU (http://www.kotinet.com/1541); it seems to offer true, cycle-level 1541 emulation. (It needs its own cabletype to work, though).
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Posted By
MikeZ
on 2011-01-12
14:37:25
| Re: Mass-Storage for Plus/4
One thing to consider is what Commodore file types are supported with each of these devices.
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Posted By
Jay
on 2011-05-01
07:59:04
| Re: Mass-Storage for Plus/4
What do you put on the SD card for the IEC devices - is it just disk images? Can it handle programs, or do you need to turn them into images first?
Love the idea of being able to archive quantities of disks on a small, cheap device!
Thanks!
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