Commodore Disk Drive Discussion

[BillC]

9 hours ago, DrVenkman said:

I was mostly just being silly in my last post though I really did encourage Jon to keep it in. Thanks really go to him for implementing it in the first place! I have been messing about lately with a C64 that I restored in recent weeks and the crazy-slow disk I/O combined with the fact that data transfer is silent except for movement of the drive or an indication on the screen of a solid state device is very frustrating. It's difficult to know if anything is actually happening, you know? Makes me appreciate the happy accident of Atari's signature SIO noise all the more. 

 

 

Just thought you should be aware the Commodore PET and C64 floppy drives had, and may still have, a serious bug when saving a file from BASIC using the Save-with-Replace command(SAVE@). Doing so would often corrupt the file/disk.

https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue65/save_with_replace.php

 

I never owned one of these computers/drives myself but encountered it on my brothers Commodore PET in 1979, believe it was a 2040 dual drive, before I got an Atari 400 a year or two later. I didn't know what the issue was at the time, but eventually found that saving to a new file name(without using the Save-with-Replace command) resolved the problem.

[+DrVenkman]

4 hours ago, BillC said:

Just thought you should be aware the Commodore PET and C64 floppy drives had, and may still have, a serious bug when saving a file from BASIC using the Save-with-Replace command(SAVE@). Doing so would often corrupt the file/disk.

https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue65/save_with_replace.php

I’m mostly playing games and listening to SID music but I think I was tangentially aware of that or had picked it up along the way. I’m currently using an EasyFlash 3 cartridge which allows replacement kernal ROMs to be used with the machine in lieu of the buggy internal disk routines. Fixing stuff like that and the terribly slow serial I/O are high on the list of reasons to use something like that. 

[Mrarkus]

22 hours ago, DrVenkman said:

I’m mostly playing games and listening to SID music but I think I was tangentially aware of that or had picked it up along the way. I’m currently using an EasyFlash 3 cartridge which allows replacement kernal ROMs to be used with the machine in lieu of the buggy internal disk routines. Fixing stuff like that and the terribly slow serial I/O are high on the list of reasons to use something like that. 

Just load JiffyDOS as a replacement Kernal in EasyFlash 3 and if you don't have one already, get an SD2IEC device, and you should be good to go. If you want to get fancy, you can get Ultimate II+ cart and DMA load programs from it (almost instantly), has drive sounds built-in with volume control, and it has a great SID player built-in (can even emulate 2 SIDs!)  Anyway, off topic, but you mentioned you listen to SID music.

Edited August 14, 2019 by Mrarkus

[+DrVenkman]

1 hour ago, Mrarkus said:

Just load JiffyDOS as a replacement Kernal in EasyFlash 3 and if you don't have one already, get an SD2IEC device, and you should be good to go. If you want to get fancy, you can get Ultimate II+ cart and DMA load programs from it (almost instantly), has drive sounds built-in with volume control, and it has a great SID player built-in (can even emulate 2 SIDs!)  Anyway, off topic, but you mentioned you listen to SID music.

I’ve got JiffyDOS in the EasyFlash 3 cart and I have a Pi1541 hat on top of a spare RPi3 I had around here. I’m pretty set for my C64 fooling around.  

 

[candle]

any luck with pi1541? for me this barely works - unfortunatly, as i thought it was a chance to get decent storage option for commodore plus4

on c64 i've tested it briefly, and it sorta worked, but not quite - if it was single disk demo - no problem, but if you had to change the disk, although it did just that, second part was seldomly loaded properly

don't know what was the issue there, but didn't leave me with positive bias towards this device

 

[+DrVenkman]

Hmm ... I have only really used it to load single disk games. I should find some multi disk games this weekend and see how the Pi1541 handles the second disk.

 

What version is the software on your Pi1541? Last time I checked on Github it was up to version 1.20. 

[candle]

i used various ones as i tryed diffrent options (unidirectional/bidirectional) and three iterations of my own pi hat boards, and nothing worked (for unidirectional mode - which suppose to be superior), then i've bought simple pi-hat from ebay - this used simple, bidirectional layout and sorta works ?

 

[+DrVenkman]

19 minutes ago, candle said:

i used various ones as i tryed diffrent options (unidirectional/bidirectional) and three iterations of my own pi hat boards, and nothing worked (for unidirectional mode - which suppose to be superior), then i've bought simple pi-hat from ebay - this used simple, bidirectional layout and sorta works ?

 

I bought this one on eBay and it seems to work pretty well. Like I said I haven’t tested multi disk games but I will try some and see how it goes. 
 

[candle]

games are not an issue i think - demos are, and this is my sole reason to bother at first place

the one on picture looks like mine 

[+DrVenkman]

3 hours ago, candle said:

games are not an issue i think - demos are, and this is my sole reason to bother at first place

the one on picture looks like mine 

Hmmm ... well I just tried a 2-disk game (SEVEN CITIES OF GOLD) and the process went fine. I had side 1 set as 0 and side 2 set as 1, selected 0 using the up/down keys (switches 2 and 3 on the hat) and booted. When the program prompted me to swap disks, I switched to the second disk with the down button (switch 2) and the game loaded up and started perfectly.

 

Can you post the .D64 or .D81 files you're using so I can try them? I'm guessing they're probably PAL though, right? Never mind.  

[candle]

you can get them on pouet or demozoo

demo is called tower of power

it's quite an old one, but still

i think for games they don't use fastloaders, so timings are not so critical, and demos do all kind of wierd shit to get the bytes flying from this crappy disk drives

yes all demos are pal - you don't have demoscene in the states i'm affride