INTVCruise Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 Hello everyone, I just got a nice working c128 with the 1571 disc drive with a bunch of discs amd I was looking into information about backing the discs up and what not. While searching i came across the altenatives to the drive including the sd2cei and the zoomfloopy. Right now im leaning towards the zoom floppy moreso because I cant seem to find anyone in the us selling the sd2cei, and the zoom floppy looks to be available in the usa. My question is if im looking to copy d64 files to floppy from thw zoom floppy to the actual 1571 will that be possible? Thanks to all! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 You are comparing apples and bananas here. The sd2iec is a memory card based storage solution primarily intended to replace a floppy drive, but you can just as well use it in conjuction with a real drive on the C128. In order to backup disks to image files you would use a copying program like e.g. CBM-Command. The main reseller of sd2iec devices today seems to be the UK based The Future was 8-bit, but you might want to know that the uIEC/SD device sold by US based Retro Innovations is functionally identical. ZoomFloppy is a device to connect a floppy drive to a PC, and is a successor to the older X*1541 series cables, which also still exist in newer USB based solutions (look for XU1541, XUM1541). The ZoomFloppy won't enable you to use memory cards on the C128, only to transfer files to/from floppy disks which can be useful in particular if you have a spare drive which can be semi-permanently attached to your PC. Retro Innovations sells the ZoomFloppy as well for a little over half the price of an uIEC/SD so you can compare the two products which better fits your needs. The software used with ZoomFloppy indeed lets you create image files and transfer entire disks as well as individual files. There are a few different software packages on the PC side. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
INTVCruise Posted June 8, 2020 Author Share Posted June 8, 2020 19 minutes ago, carlsson said: You are comparing apples and bananas here. The sd2iec is a memory card based storage solution primarily intended to replace a floppy drive, but you can just as well use it in conjuction with a real drive on the C128. In order to backup disks to image files you would use a copying program like e.g. CBM-Command. The main reseller of sd2iec devices today seems to be the UK based The Future was 8-bit, but you might want to know that the uIEC/SD device sold by US based Retro Innovations is functionally identical. ZoomFloppy is a device to connect a floppy drive to a PC, and is a successor to the older X*1541 series cables, which also still exist in newer USB based solutions (look for XU1541, XUM1541). The ZoomFloppy won't enable you to use memory cards on the C128, only to transfer files to/from floppy disks which can be useful in particular if you have a spare drive which can be semi-permanently attached to your PC. Retro Innovations sells the ZoomFloppy as well for a little over half the price of an uIEC/SD so you can compare the two products which better fits your needs. The software used with ZoomFloppy indeed lets you create image files and transfer entire disks as well as individual files. There are a few different software packages on the PC side. Hello carlsson, thank you for clearing all of that up, much appreciated. Just want to be 100% sure... So if I am just looking to copy d64 programs from pc to floppy disk and play the copied floppy on the original drive then the zoomfloppy would be more than enough to do so. Thanks again! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 Yes, for that usage ZoomFloppy is good. I suppose if you have a laptop, you can bring it to your C128 setup and plug in the IEC cable into the interface, instead of bringing the 1571 drive to a desktop PC. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Papalapa Posted June 9, 2020 Share Posted June 9, 2020 Have you seen the Pi1541?. It's an drive floppy emulator based on Raspberry PI and works like a charm. I use this device with both, Commodore 64 and VIC-20. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DrVenkman Posted June 23, 2020 Share Posted June 23, 2020 On 6/9/2020 at 1:27 AM, Papalapa said: Have you seen the Pi1541?. It's an drive floppy emulator based on Raspberry PI and works like a charm. I use this device with both, Commodore 64 and VIC-20. I use one of those as well. I had an RPi3 that wasn't being used, so I bought a pre-built Pi1541 hat to plug into the Raspberry Pi on eBay and I was good to go. The fun thing about the hat I bought is it has a little piezo speaker that clicks like a real disk drive, lol. https://cbm-pi1541.firebaseapp.com/ 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
motrucker Posted July 18, 2020 Share Posted July 18, 2020 I also use a Pi 1541, since I had an Pi 3 here doing nothing. Makes a great drive for not much money, even if you have to buy the Pi. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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