Few questions about my plans

[pogof]

@GARTHWILSON Thanks, you must every time I post something, remind me about the primer, because I will probably forget next day (no joke).
As for the wire wrapping I wasnt able to soure the tools so I will just stick to the classic method (may be not that elegannt as WW but working), but I will look out for them. As for the reset, the one I build is very simulat to the primer 4th one. I already had all build materials so that is what I built.

As for @Vladimir, I dont know if I will use the ACIA at all, I have it there, because I can and if I need to use it I can hook it up.

[Dr Jefyll]

Hi, pogof. It's nice to hear about your project. Have you started soldering yet? If not, then perhaps you'll consider changing the layout a bit first. It might be better if the RAM and the ROM are side by side. That way it will be easier and you'll end up with nice tidy wiring in that area because almost all the RAM and ROM pins are in parallel. Also, I think the point Vladimir mentioned is quite important.

-- Jeff

Vladimir wrote:

I have installed connectors beside VIA and ASIA IC's (for ribbon cables with IDC). I think, it is more comfortable than floppy soldered wires around board.

[pogof]

Derp I already soldered all the sockets. Oh, well may be next time. With the ACIA, if you mean using connector and ribbon cable of some sort, I bought a 6 meters of 24 wire gray ribbon cable. It is intendet to route the data and address bus, but with dupont (or something like that) connectors that I have and can be used with classic single row male headers, I can make a little cable.

Edit (even before posting): I just realize what Vladimir ment and yes I will add some headers at the side of the ICs and as I said, I will make a cables out of the ribbon cable for better wireing.

[pogof]

Small update, I am now at Apple museum with school. I saw ceramic 6502 and (without a proof) working Apple I and actually all of the other machines. The newest technology here is futuristic lobby with iPad like screens. One broke screen when someone touched it and a lot of them are turned off. To power them on (even from sleep) you need to pry them out of the wall. Brawo Apple!

[cbmeeks]

pogof wrote:

Small update, I am now at Apple museum with school. I saw ceramic 6502 and (without a proof) working Apple I and actually all of the other machines. The newest technology here is futuristic lobby with iPad like screens. One broke screen when someone touched it and a lot of them are turned off. To power them on (even from sleep) you need to pry them out of the wall. Brawo Apple!

I am seriously 10,000 times more excited about an Apple 1 (or, even a replica Apple 1) than I am about the newest phone or tablet.

I am so over phones/tablets....

Apple 1 to Macintosh SE/30 were the best things Apple ever did.

[pogof]

I feel the same. All of the iPads iPods and iPhones looked exactly the same, I not even kidding. There was a iPhone prototype, that is the only interesting thing there. All and All I am happy that I was able to see the museum. It should be the biggest in world (or whatever) with every machine ever produced (except Xservers, no one give a s*it about them). But the most bizare looking machine was the 20th anniversary Macintosh edition, it looks like dalek from Dr Who (or simpley IoT trashcan with screen).

Anyway, back to work. I started drawing some "schematics" so I can see what should connect where. I can predict that there will be some kind a mystery already, so stay put for mountain of questions

[pogof]

Hi all!

So not much progress on my project. But I was able to find Commodore 64C in great condition (only few black something that I was able to clean and also it yellowed, but no problem there) with some peripherals (in not so good condition):

- tape deck (someone put something hot on it I suppose and I had to change the belt)
- power supply
- mouse (partialy working, but crazy as ... on screen; also it is not the original mouse but some different, idk)
- joystick 1 (red and grey; had broken plastic handle that I glued together)
- joystick 2 (QuickShot; just really bad I will try to change the PCB what was inside was just horrible; I soldered few buttons and used the cabel so I could do some testing for time being)
- Final cartridge III
- Super games cartridge
- Few tapes (with some cracked games, lot of them dont work)

I olso ordered some tape games from ebay and now I am bidding on 5.25 floppy drive.


And I found dads old notebook with Win2000 on it that I will convert to MS-DOS (or I hope to do so). It has swapable CD and 3.5 floppy drive and Paralel port! (You never know when you need one ) I read on internet that with special cable, you can use DOS (/w paralel port) to write data to the 5.25 floppy in commodore format. So that is the plan.


So thats it for this year, I will probably work on the main project after christmas or after cleaning C64 and the notebook. If someone want photo of anything I will try to add some but I crashed Firefox two times and lost my open tabs and very long post so definetly not adding them with Firefox again.

[cbmeeks]

pogof wrote:

So not much progress on my project. But I was able to find Commodore 64C in great condition (only few black something that I was able to clean and also it yellowed, but no problem there)

That's awesome. The C64 is my all time favorite computer.

pogof wrote:

And I found dads old notebook with Win2000 on it that I will convert to MS-DOS (or I hope to do so). It has swapable CD and 3.5 floppy drive and Paralel port! (You never know when you need one ) I read on internet that with special cable, you can use DOS (/w paralel port) to write data to the 5.25 floppy in commodore format. So that is the plan.

Yes, you can do that. I used to build my own. But I highly recommend getting either a ZoomFloppy (http://store.go4retro.com/zoomfloppy/) or one of those SD2IEC devices. Much easier and faster than messing about with that cable. The ZoomFloppy is nice in that it allows you to connect a real 1541 drive to a modern PC. The SD2IEC is nice (although, more expensive) in allowing you to simply drag software to an SD card and load them on your C64.

[GARTHWILSON]

How do you get around the problem that the tracks on a double-density or high-density floppy-disc drive are much narrower than those used by the 1541 drive?

[cbmeeks]

GARTHWILSON wrote:

How do you get around the problem that the tracks on a double-density or high-density floppy-disc drive are much narrower than those used by the 1541 drive?

I'm not sure I understand the question.

[DerTrueForce]

I think what Garth is driving at is that the tracks on the floppies are different widths for different densities and standards.

(This info is from Wikipedia, and the explanation probably isn't the best.)
A double-density 5.25 floppy disk holds 360 KB (on the PC. The high-density ones hold 1.2MB).
The 1541 formats the same disks for 170 KB, and it's single-sided. This is a bit less than half of 360 KB.

This would seem to imply that the 1541 expects wider tracks than the PC floppies.

[GARTHWILSON]

Yes, we ran into this problem at work around 1990. I can't remember the details anymore, but when we wanted floppies formatted for low density with the wider tracks, we always had one particular person format them on his old laptop, because the PCs at work had double- or high-density floppy-disc drives with heads that gave narrower tracks and didn't erase or record the entire width of the track that had been there before.

[Tor]

As far as I know the HD floppies use a different (higher) coercivity medium as well.

[cbmeeks]

Well, I'm not sure if this makes any sense, but what I was referring to was using 1541 formatted disks on a modern PC. The ZoomFloppy connects a 1541 drive to a modern PC. Also, you don't use Windows to format the ZoomFloppy disks. You use custom software that runs on the modern PC to format the 1541 disks into a format the C64 understands.

You also have to use the custom software to read 1541 disks back into the PC. But it's really easy.

[White Flame]

BTW, there's a utility called 1541-reads-dos that I used back in the day, which required a wire or 2 to be modded inside the 1541. I used a high-density 5.25" PC disk drive to write to single-density DOS-formatted disks, and the 1541 could read it just fine via the software, regardless of reuse of the disk by the PC. I used it quite a bit.