Help copying old disks with U 1541 II

[ubersaurus]

I got the Ultimate 1541 II about a week back and have been really digging it, but being in NTSC-land I'm having an irritating time finding disk images that are specific to my region. I do have a stack of old floppy disks that I'm trying to copy using the UII, but so far without much success. Specifically, I've tested it out on Pirates. Pirates definitely loads up just fine on the old VIC-1541 drive, but attempting to load the copy on the UII using the built-in copier just leaves it hanging; for whatever reason large chunks of data copying screen are just blank. Anyone have advice?

 

I've also tested Zak McKraken, which seems to copy all the data blocks over but for whatever reason the boot disk copy on the UII just gives me a disk read error when it doesn't just sit there.

 

 

[+sm3]

I got the Ultimate 1541 II about a week back and have been really digging it, but being in NTSC-land I'm having an irritating time finding disk images that are specific to my region. I do have a stack of old floppy disks that I'm trying to copy using the UII, but so far without much success. Specifically, I've tested it out on Pirates. Pirates definitely loads up just fine on the old VIC-1541 drive, but attempting to load the copy on the UII using the built-in copier just leaves it hanging; for whatever reason large chunks of data copying screen are just blank. Anyone have advice?

 

I've also tested Zak McKraken, which seems to copy all the data blocks over but for whatever reason the boot disk copy on the UII just gives me a disk read error when it doesn't just sit there.

 

 

 

Hello, you probably already know this, but since you are using original disks, it's probably some form of copy protection that you're running into. I think you'll have to either find a piece of software that is known to be able to bypass and duplicate these disks or you use flux level external hardware to copy the disks.

 

Have you tried using this search engine to search for NTSC stuff to use? https://cbm8bit.com/8bit/commodore/search or you can use http://csdb.dk/ and search for NTSC stuff as well.

 

Some software that might work (but I think you need ZoomFloppy for this with your PC):

 

https://c64preservation.com/index.php/nibtools

 

Here are some flux level copiers:

 

https://www.kryoflux.com/?page=kf_features

 

https://www.cbmstuff.com/proddetail.php?prod=SCP

 

I myself went PAL for this very reason with a 64 Reloaded.

[ubersaurus]

Good point, the copy protection is very likely the culprit here. csdb is incredibly difficult to search for programs through I've found, (and gb64 isn't always accurate) but I'd not heard of cbm8bit. I'll give that a look!

 

And yeah... at some point having a way to play PAL stuff would be cool.