SpiceWare

Though bear in mind that with the 1541 you could flip the disk over to use side 2 for another 170kB of storage. Not the same thing - I wouldn't want to have to sit there flipping floppies over every time my BBS users changed discussion forums.

Now THAT's "old-school" (overused cliche' but appropriate here). I'd best the vast majority of users have never seen one. The high school I went to had a bunch of Commodore PETs. In 1980, start of my freshmen year, I was in a softmore math class and our teach gave us homework a month at a time. The 2nd week of the 2nd month he had to do something during class, so told us we should work on our homework - I pulled out my English. He noticed and asked why I wasn't working on math and was surprised when I showed him the completed months worth of math homework(I suspect he was surprised as we hadn't covered all the month's material yet). They had a PET in the math teacher's office, which was adjacent to our classroom, so he took me their office, gave me the manual and told me to have fun. He also ran semester long Diplomacy games, as well as other games that I became involved in. The school had a junior/senior only computer class, but anybody could use the lab after school was out so I was often in there. If I recall correctly, there were 2 tables and each table had 6 Commodore PETs and a 4040 that was shared amongst the 6 on that table. The IEEE-488 bus supported the sharing as up to 15 devices could be on the same bus. I must have missed this message. The Mega-Cart is unbelieveable! I just ordered one. Between this and Ultimate 1541, I'm going to have to Ebay a couple of Commies. Going to have to clear some desk space. Take note that the Ataris still get the "A" spot. Thanks for showing me all of this stuff ; you made me blow my Xbox 360 money that I'd been saving up for. On the other hand, I don't think Xbox 360 stuff is going away any time soon. Guess I'd rather fool with this stuff than play Halo 3 anyway, as I've hardly played the first couple Halos. Yeah, I'm still waiting for the message that my mega-cart is ready.

I think games were only released on the 5 1/4" disks. The 1571 was backward compatible with the 1541, so it didn't matter which drive you had for games. The main benefit of the 1571 was twice the storage and faster speed. It also could read CP/M disks for when the 128 was booted up on it's Z80. While I didn't often use CP/M, I did use that ability to read CP/M disks from a friend's TRS-80 (don't recall which model it was).

Will do. The Warehouse Live is a pretty small venue, max of 1500 people, so it should be a cozy show. They must be getting more popular though as The Meridian, where they played last year, maxed out at under 1000 people.

I haven't gotten that far, yet my score's quite a bit higher. I suspect you're not picking up the tips.

it can use the expansion port, but it doesn't have to. From their site: That's why it can be used on a VIC 20 which has a different expansion port than the 64/128 used. The 1541 included a program called DOS Wedge that added commands for working with the drive, such as @$ to display the directory without wiping out the currently loaded BASIC program. On the PET it used > instead of @, which is where the Wedge part of the name came from. The DOS Wedge was later incorporated into the Fast Load cartridges. For the most part open 15,8,15,"drive_command":close 15 is replaced by @drive_command Commodore's DOS does support copying files and complete disks to another disk, but only on dual-drives like the 4040 that I'd used on a PET. Commodore planned dual-drives for the serial bus, but never released any. At least 1 third party company offered a dual drive, the MSD Super Disk. I like its design better than Commodore's Here's the 4040 manual. The copy command would be used as open 15,8,15,"c1:newcopy=0:original":close15 The 1: and 0: tell it which drive to use. 0: is the default, so it is normally left off when used on the 1541. To duplicate a floppy just leave off the filename - open15,8,15,"c1=0":close15, of course the wedge was normally loaded, so most people would have typed @1=0 or >1=0. Commodore did include a program for duplicating disks using a single drive, though it was painfully slow and third party offerings filled the gap.

41,425

Sound interesting. I'll check the rest of the songs later tonight, have a project to wrap up outside before it gets dark. Tomorrow night's the Ladytron concert in Houston, I can't wait

That's why I'd like one, the MMC64 which I currently use only works on my 128 in 64 mode. Jupiter Lander was a cartridge based game. There's a number of them currently available on E-Bay, though I'd recommend going with a Mega-Cart.

It may have been ambitious, but coming from this it seemed the next logical step to take advantage of the faster modem speeds. With the slower modems you could pretty much read as fast as the text came over, with the faster ones a screen would fill up and the connection would then be idle waiting for you to finish reading. I figured that idle time could be put to use, especially since files to transfer were getting bigger and bigger and with a 50MB hard drive there would be a lot more files available than before. I was the same way with the drive noises I'd actually wake up if there was no drive noises, say due to a power failure. I was glad when I ported the BBS to the 128 so I could use the auto boot feature. I even got the 128 to be able to auto boot the 64 BBS. One of the last things I did with my 128 BBS was to add ANSI support. It translated PETSCII graphics to ANSI (where it could), and converted the 1 character PETSCII cursor and color codes to the ANSI escape sequence equivalents. Never messed with wardialing or LD codes, though I knew people who did.

Me too. I was porting my BBS software to the Amiga when I discovered the internet at the University of Houston and I promptly lost interest in the BBS scene and spent my time with Archie, Veronica, Gopher, Anonymous FTP, USENET, etc (it was pre-Web). I had some neat stuff worked out on paper for the Amiga BBS - it was going to use data packets so the user could queue up file transfers (up and down), then while the files were transferring they could continue to use the BBS to read messages, play games, listen to music, etc. The BBS and custom term program gave the file transfer packets the lowest priority. I think the music packets had the highest priority(so music wouldn't stutter), followed by the text. There were no joystick packets, instead a single byte in every packet held the current joystick reading. Didn't realize it at the time, but it was basically PPP with QoS.

That's pretty clever. The only unusual joystick port project I ever did was to mount thermistors in the shade outside my apartment window. I had it hooked up so my 64/128 BBS could display the current temperature as the user logged in. Took a while to calibrate the readings.

Actually, a more correct statement would be he's a rabidly biased Commodore user in a rabidly biased Atari forum. Don't tell me that's not true, I experienced that first hand when I corrected that the statement "a million VIC 20s were sold" should really have been the statement "VIC 20 was the first computer to sell a million". Big difference, and instead of acknowledging the clarification the general rabid Atari fan response was "the VIC was insignificant crap". Not everyone here is so biased, but enough are that most of the replies are people talking past each other. Sadly, this results in the interesting tidbits getting lost in the flood.

Not normally, though the SX-64 had a built in 1541 and 5" color display. The 128D had a built in 1571, it also increased video memory for the 80 column display from 16KB to 64KB which allowed for a 720x700 display(I frequently ran my C=128 at 640x400 to get an 80x50 character display, which was very useful when coding). Commodore's drives were: 1541 - 5 1/4 @ 170 KB 1571 - 5 1/4 @ 340 KB 1581 - 3 1/2 @ 800 KB The 1541 was single sided, the 1571 was double sided. The 1571 supported the 128's faster transfer speed, plus it could slow down for use on a 64. One neat feature was the ability to treat each side of the floppy as a separate disk. Most people didn't need that feature, but I used it on my BBS* as it doubled the maximum directory entries from 144 for the whole floppy to 144 per side. The 1581 also supported the 128's faster speed as well as the 64. One feature I used a lot was the ability to partition the floppy. Normally the max dir entries was 296, but by partitioning the floppy you could double, triple, etc. the maximum files. I think I had mine partitioned into 4 (or 5) directories, so could handle almost 1200 (or 1500) files on one floppy. * each message, email, etc. was a separate file so the BBS quickly hit the maximum directory entries.

I bet you haven't heard of the campgrounds either

The 1541 speed issues are directly related to a buggy 6522 VIA hardware chip in the VIC 20. Commodore could have fixed it when making the 64 and 1541, as they eventually did with the 128 and 1571, but choose not to in order to maintain compatibility with existing peripherals. I suppose Commodore's thinking could have been if they hadn't then the VICs would more easily be replaced with something other than the 64 as the person would have had to buy all new peripherals anyway. From Wiki article on Fast Loaders: I do recall a really slick disk copy program for the 1541 that was popular at the Commodore user group meetings. You would take two 1541s, have the 64 send them some software and then unplug the drives from the 64. Put a source floppy in the first drive, blank in the second and when the latch was closed the drives would duplicate the floppy. When done you could put another blank in the second drive and another duplicate would be made (you could also replace the first floppy before putting in the blank to copy a different disk). It was probably Fast Hack'em, though I don't know for sure.

7993 - my thumb hurts

the names of the games in question would be very helpful

Those versions probably trigger the Supercharger to bank switch since it wasn't written with that in mind.

4838

Thanks for checking!

That's impressive! How well does it handle the various scan line counts? Can PAL games still be played on NTSC systems? I'm able to do that now as my CyberTech is driving my old C=1084S.

That it does, but I find the 10,000 bonus points worth it

Ah, clever!

Seems that changing the input order would confuse the kids... What's the 30443 for at the end? I hadn't noticed the number at the end before.