Commodore
emulation file formats; Peter Schepers (author of 64-Copy)
wrote a documentation of many different Commodore computer (and
CBM emulation) related file formats. One half are containers for
virtual representations of Floppy diskettes or Tapes. The other
half are well known archive formats, that were used on Commodore
computers.
ARJuna, a
versatile, universal floppy format importing and exporting
software for the Catweasel controller. The sourcecode is
available and published under the GNU General Public License.
With its plugin concept and the capabilities of the Catweasel
it is able to support virtuallay any known and unknown floppy
disk format: FM, MFM, GCR and every RLL(x,y) encoding scheme.
Currently the GCR encoding and the high level sector format of
the Commodore home computer disk drive series is supported.
Disk2FDI, a
software doing a nearly impossible thing. It is able to read
non standard disks (foreign MFM formats) with the floppy disk
controller of common PCs.
Disk2FDI version 0.96α was the first release, that was
also able to import GCR formatted disks. Now everyone can do CBM
disk imports without additional cables or other stuff. The
current
Disk2FDI
version 0.99α3 adds support for modified 300 rpm high
density floppy disk drives, which frees the user from searching
rare double density disk drives.
DCN-2692, the CBM-1581 clone controller board; Mika
Leinonen reengineered the controller board of the 3,5" C1581
disk drive and developed a clone of it. He provides all the
schematics, glue logic design files (equations as well as JEDEC
files) and even the layouts for his PCB design. He also offers
some factory-made boards with or without the parts soldered
(announced: 2003-05-21, prices between €75 and €90).
Also have a look onto his
XPADME-1541 cable,
an interesting adaption of the »well known« X series
cables.
Kroko's 1541 serial interface project; this is the first
widely known solution, where someone demonstrated a
microcontroller based solution to interface common PCs with the
Commodore serial IEC bus. Independent from the PC configuration,
the hardware is able to establish a crystal clear timing for
proper communication.
A similar project is Marko Mäkelä's well known
C2N232.
Sometime in the future,
controllers with an USB connection (more listed
at Keil software)
instead of RS232 may be needed for modern computers. One example
are PIC microcontrollers from MicroChip with
built-in USB core
(sample
application for driving a LCD panel).
Firmware based solutions for lower bandwidth needs may show
Igor Češko's USB project and a
Linux API for it; for similar (and derived) projects see
also:
MJoy
and
CJoy.
An implementation that looks more prefessional comes from
Objective Development and is available under an Open
Source license model as well as a commercial license.
A predecessor to both former projects is
USBtiny with similarities to Objective Development's
solutions. It is distributed under the GNU General Public
License and contains further optimizations to speed up
some other aspects of the protocol handler. Beside that
USBtiny is better configurable regarding pin selections.
Single USB product IDs (PIDs)
that are needed to deliver a new USB device to the world can be
purchased from Mecanique at a lower cost than becoming an USB
vendor themself. They also sell a
HID driver and firmware generation tool.
VOTI assigned PIDs are similar to Mecanique's service.
More and more USB links:
-
A port of the
libUSB library and generic driver to the
Windows operating system (libUSB-win32),
-
mikrocontroller.net's
USB overview and some
USB links,
-
sample application for
Texas Instruments' TUSB3210
-
Henrik Haftmann's
USB2LPT2 neat converter board with some awesome
features over common USB-LPT adaptor boxes. Henrik's driver
software is able to capture direct LPT port accesses from
old (DOS) software and redirect it to his USB2LPT2 port
converter. If latency is not a big problem for the software
to function, then this is a good solution to
»port« old software with direct register access
to the LPT hardware.
CBM-Hackers mailing list archive; this mail archive
collects discussions about internal topics of the Commodore
computers. Most is hardware or development oriented, some are
emulation related.
DigiDOS,
an american clone of the well known european SpeedDOS system.
Raj extracted the ROM images and typed in the manual, he
collected it all along with the tool disk on his web page.
The page
1541C-ROM
für Commodore 1571 (german language web page with
download links) describes a ROM replacement for the 1541
compatibility part of the ROM of the 1571 disk drive. It's a
patched version of the ROM for the 1541C disk drive. The result
is a 1571 disk drive, that is claimed to be 99,99% compatible to
the 1541 disk drive.
A Look Around the 1571, »Commodore's Disk Drive
Companion to the 128« is an article of the Ahoy! magazine,
issue 21 of September 1985. It describes the C1571 disk drive
and shows some fine inner view pictures of it. Another web site
presents extremely
high resolution pictures of the 1571.