Hank Rearden Posted March 18, 2017 Share Posted March 18, 2017 I just got a like new C64 and looking for the best and fastest way to start playing some games. I've learned a little about the SD2IEC and it seems like you can only really get them from overseas. I have no real issue with that other than the shipping charges. Anyone have a USA source? Preferably one of those that looks like a mini 1541? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted March 18, 2017 Share Posted March 18, 2017 NKC Electronics in Florida used to sell SD2IEC but they had a discount sale and now are out of stock, likely permanently. Jim Brain at RETRO Innovations is selling the uIEC/SD which is using the SD2IEC firmware. It doesn't come with a nifty enclosure though, but it could be worth having a look. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesD Posted March 18, 2017 Share Posted March 18, 2017 If you only want to use it with a C64, you can get them pretty cheap that uses the C64 for power. If you ever want to use it with a Plus/4, consider one that has an external power supply. Yes it will cost a little more. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hank Rearden Posted March 18, 2017 Author Share Posted March 18, 2017 Thanks for the information. I do plan to only use it with the C64. Retron Innovations seems a bit pricey for what you get in my opinion. It was worth the look. I might just pay a little extra and ship one in from England. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bpatte02 Posted March 18, 2017 Share Posted March 18, 2017 I got mine from https://www.thefuturewas8bit.com/It's a British company, but they make some nice looking ones that work well. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
landgraf Posted March 18, 2017 Share Posted March 18, 2017 Before buying I'd also double-check that the firmware source for the particular device is made available by the vendor in compliance to the GPL 2.0 license under which the original firmware is published. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danny_galaga Posted March 19, 2017 Share Posted March 19, 2017 I bought two from Poland. Not much more than about half the price of some of the others, but works exactly the same. Forgotten the link now. Got them on ebay. They also use power from the C64 to work. Quite a neat setup (",) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesD Posted March 19, 2017 Share Posted March 19, 2017 I have one of these. http://www.c64sdcard.hu/en/products.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hank Rearden Posted March 19, 2017 Author Share Posted March 19, 2017 Before buying I'd also double-check that the firmware source for the particular device is made available by the vendor in compliance to the GPL 2.0 license under which the original firmware is published. Can you please clarify this for an learning noob? I saw a comment on a YouTube video about people with an NTSC 64 having issues finding disk images online as most of them are for PAL. What is the best option for someone USA based? The only game I have is Radar Rat Race and that will get old fast! LOL Oh, I also have Munchmath on cassette....LOL And why are 64s so popular in Europe? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
landgraf Posted March 19, 2017 Share Posted March 19, 2017 Can you please clarify this for an learning noob? Well, the guy who wrote the original SD2IEC firmware published it under the GPL V2 license, which among other things states that the sourcecode of said firmware MUST be made available to the public along with the binaries, and anyone is free to grab and modify the firmware as long as he also documents the changes and makes the modified sources available under the same GPL V2 license, too. Over the years there have been numerous people producing SD2IEC-like devices with various modifications of hard- and/or firmware, but not all of them could be arsed to put the meagre 300K of source on their website for whatever lame reasons. For you as the end customer that can turn out to be problematic, for instance if the original firmware gets some major functionality upgrades but can't run out-of-the-box on your specific device. If the manufacturer is sitting on his source code it all depends on whether he is interested in incorporating the new features in his specific firmware or not, and if he isn't interested anymore you are pretty much out of luck. I saw a comment on a YouTube video about people with an NTSC 64 having issues finding disk images online as most of them are for PAL. What is the best option for someone USA based? The only game I have is Radar Rat Race and that will get old fast! LOL Oh, I also have Munchmath on cassette....LOL Your best bet is probably searching the CSDb for cracks made by North American groups like Eaglesoft Inc., North East Crackers etc. NTSC versions of games made by US based companies like Activision, Microprose, EA etc. should also be easy to find. Games of European origin are otherwise hit and miss though, not all of them can be fixed to run flawlessly on NTSC. And why are 64s so popular in Europe? It was affordable and gave you quite some bang for the buck. I mean look at the 64K of ram, it's very unlikely a computer program will EVER need more than that! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hank Rearden Posted March 19, 2017 Author Share Posted March 19, 2017 I got mine from https://www.thefuturewas8bit.com/It's a British company, but they make some nice looking ones that work well. I was looking at their site and actually sent them a question trying to inquire about some of the potential issues in this thread. Curious to know what your experience has been? Have you had any issues in setting it up and running games, etc? Is this a good source of games? http://www.c64.com/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bpatte02 Posted March 19, 2017 Share Posted March 19, 2017 I was looking at their site and actually sent them a question trying to inquire about some of the potential issues in this thread. Curious to know what your experience has been? Have you had any issues in setting it up and running games, etc? Is this a good source of games? http://www.c64.com/ I didn't have much problem, it took a while to get over the Atlantic, but it seems to work great. I can't answer about that source for games as I own a Vic-20, however if you're ok with the grey area of preloaded SD cards, they offer that along with the SD2IEC. I don't think it was too much more so just an option. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hank Rearden Posted March 20, 2017 Author Share Posted March 20, 2017 Can you play Vic 20 games on the 64? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+OLD CS1 Posted March 20, 2017 Share Posted March 20, 2017 hrmmmm... I got this one eBay Auction -- Item Number: 172416857009. I honestly have not had a chance to try it out as I have been too busy. Am I in any kind of kimchi with this device? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesD Posted March 20, 2017 Share Posted March 20, 2017 Can you play Vic 20 games on the 64? no Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted March 20, 2017 Share Posted March 20, 2017 I think the shady ones are those who don't refer to SD2IEC in the description or specs, but make it look like they developed their very own SD based solution. On the other end, we have those manufacturers who actively try to work with the firmware developers to improve the product for everyone. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danny_galaga Posted March 20, 2017 Share Posted March 20, 2017 hrmmmm... I got this one eBay Auction -- Item Number: 172416857009. I honestly have not had a chance to try it out as I have been too busy. Am I in any kind of kimchi with this device? That looks very similar to my Polish ones. Can't vouch for your particular seller, but the design is nice and compact, and no cables (or cabels ) It is a little tricky to remove again but you shouldn't need to. Also the SD card is a little tricky to remove and that would be handy to remove from time to time. All I did was superglue a thin scrap of ring shaped ply to the SD card. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
7800fan Posted March 20, 2017 Share Posted March 20, 2017 no Pure BASIC code with no poke command for VIC-20 can run on C64 but the difference in screen resolution can screw up formatting. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hank Rearden Posted March 20, 2017 Author Share Posted March 20, 2017 That looks very similar to my Polish ones. Can't vouch for your particular seller, but the design is nice and compact, and no cables (or cabels ) It is a little tricky to remove again but you shouldn't need to. Also the SD card is a little tricky to remove and that would be handy to remove from time to time. All I did was superglue a thin scrap of ring shaped ply to the SD card. So will this function just like a 1541 drive? Or is it best used as a storage for downloading files onto the SD drive from the internet to use on the C64? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bpatte02 Posted March 21, 2017 Share Posted March 21, 2017 So will this function just like a 1541 drive? Or is it best used as a storage for downloading files onto the SD drive from the internet to use on the C64? I can write to my SD card via my SD2IEC, however it's apparently not a 100% emulation, so there are some programs that if they require 100& emulation will not function correctly. There is a device called the 1541 Ultimate- II that is a 100% emulation, but it costs a lot more (150€ plus shipping I believe) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted March 21, 2017 Share Posted March 21, 2017 It is a 1541 simulator if you like the term. It will load and save files, answer to standard DOS calls just like a real floppy drive would. It can even recognize some of the most common fastloaders. However this is the area where incompatibility may occur, as the real 1541 is an intelligent device with its own CPU, ROM, RAM, I/O chips, it is possible to reprogram on the fly with custom routines for faster loading. The SD2IEC doesn't have a chip large enough to fit an entire emulation, so it simulates the most common parts. Any attempt from the computer side to write to its non-existing memory will be ignored I believe, and thus original games and demos relying on the fly reprogrammable fast loaders will fail to load, except for a handful common schemes the firmware recognizes and can correctly simulate its behavior. The much more expensive 1541 Ultimate series, has bigger chips (thus it costs more) and a lot more functionality than just being a SD card reader. It emulates the drive with its own CPU, RAM and so on, meaning that custom reprogramming should always work. People tend to disregard the SD2IEC series due to it not being able to load multipart demos and the occasional D64 image of an original game (the majority of games you'll find are not in original format anyway), but I've had my uIEC/SD (that is RETRO Innovation's product, which uses the SD2IEC firmware) for about a decade (?) and very rarely have had any trouble. If you own an actual floppy drive, you can fall back on that and use software like CBM=Command to write D64 images to disk in the case you can't load it directly from the SD device. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bpatte02 Posted March 21, 2017 Share Posted March 21, 2017 (edited) It is a 1541 simulator if you like the term. It will load and save files, answer to standard DOS calls just like a real floppy drive would. It can even recognize some of the most common fastloaders. However this is the area where incompatibility may occur, as the real 1541 is an intelligent device with its own CPU, ROM, RAM, I/O chips, it is possible to reprogram on the fly with custom routines for faster loading. The SD2IEC doesn't have a chip large enough to fit an entire emulation, so it simulates the most common parts. Any attempt from the computer side to write to its non-existing memory will be ignored I believe, and thus original games and demos relying on the fly reprogrammable fast loaders will fail to load, except for a handful common schemes the firmware recognizes and can correctly simulate its behavior. The much more expensive 1541 Ultimate series, has bigger chips (thus it costs more) and a lot more functionality than just being a SD card reader. It emulates the drive with its own CPU, RAM and so on, meaning that custom reprogramming should always work. People tend to disregard the SD2IEC series due to it not being able to load multipart demos and the occasional D64 image of an original game (the majority of games you'll find are not in original format anyway), but I've had my uIEC/SD (that is RETRO Innovation's product, which uses the SD2IEC firmware) for about a decade (?) and very rarely have had any trouble. If you own an actual floppy drive, you can fall back on that and use software like CBM=Command to write D64 images to disk in the case you can't load it directly from the SD device. See I knew someone smarter than me could explain it better lol Edited March 21, 2017 by bpatte02 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesD Posted March 21, 2017 Share Posted March 21, 2017 Pure BASIC code with no poke command for VIC-20 can run on C64 but the difference in screen resolution can screw up formatting. The only thing that might come from the VIC 20 that isn't already on the C64 would be a program somebody wrote themselves. You can even read BASIC programs in and customize them to work on the C64 if you want. But I doubt that's what he's talking about when he says games. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hank Rearden Posted March 22, 2017 Author Share Posted March 22, 2017 I got mine from https://www.thefuturewas8bit.com/It's a British company, but they make some nice looking ones that work well. I guess I have to rule them out. I sent an email to their website contact and via their Ebay store and they have not replied to my inquiry. That is very concerning. I guess I need to keep looking at what my options are. I just want something the won't give me any issues. I'm willing to learn but it's hard when you can't always get immediate answers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hank Rearden Posted March 22, 2017 Author Share Posted March 22, 2017 I sent a message to Retro Innovations. They are USA based. Their SD uIEC isn't as nifty looking but with my uncertainty it may be better to deal with someone closer to home. ☺️ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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