pouët.net

Hello pouet,

I've got an issue with connecting my PC to my C64. I tried different solutions, read a hundred forums about it, yet just couldn't work it out. Maybe someone here can help.

I've got an XM1541 cable. Tested, fully functioning. Same goes for my 1541 floppy drive. The 1541 is hooked up to the only LPT port of an Abit NF7s motherboard. LPT1 is $378 mode EPP.

I tried running SC under winXP as described in a thread about this at Lemon64, but didin't succeed. No success with OpenCBM / cbm4win either, with or without UserPort running. It couldn't even reset/detect the 1541.

Then I booted FreeDOS and launched SC 0.82 from there.
I set the cable tyle, transfer speed (warp), disabled manual timeouts and forced async transfer. SC gives an error "Drive 8 not present".
When I enable "detect port modes" in SCSETUP, then the drive motor starts spinning. As soon as I start SC itself, I get an error saying "timeout detected", the motor stops spinning, and won't start again, only if I go back to SCSETUP.
I tried different delay values from 0-16, some of them results in "timeout detected" and some in "drive 8 not present".
With "detect port modes" disabled, I always get "drive 8 not present".

Tried turning on the drive first, then the PC, and vice versa, but no effect. Same when plugging the DIN5 into the other serial interface.

I checked a lot of forums but none of them gave a solution that worked... any ideas?

I used to have a 1541 and a cable, don't remember class that worked.
Then I left it for years in a storage room and forgot it.
Then I had similar problems. While the drive still worked on a C64, it couldn't be detected anymore on the PC. I don't know why.
So, I don't know if I can help here, but I'd like an answer too.
Maybe it's that I changed PC motherboard? Maybe the drive got moisture and isn't work for transfering? (I had another 1541 drive also that totally doesn't work with C64 now for the same reasons I left it somewhere outside).
It's so cumbersome on C64 to copy stuff (several minutes per disk).
CPC does it better :)

Now, the real question is, what other options are in C64 for transferring from PC and watching demos on the real thing? Are there SD-cards and such newschool hardware?

This is strange because SC has worked just fine for me from DOS 5.0 with an XE1541 cable. I don't recall the settings (I don't have my desktop here yet); maybe SC needs you to specify your CPU speed in the command line?

Starcommander does not work with post win9x, as far as I know. You'd need OpenCBM and an XM/XE1541, not sure which. Some of these cables work only on the older OS.

There's 1541u, which is a full-blown diskdrive emulator in hardware for c64 that, as far as I know, accepts SD cards. Then there's stuff like MMC Replay, MMC64, IDE64, and whatnot. Look into those and see what suits you best.

For MMC Replay / Retro Replay there's RR-NET, an ethernet extension, which can be used to transfer disks over ethernet using warpcopy.

I hope this helps and/or is valid information ;_)

I also booted from an old DOS 6.22 sysdisk, but got no success. Maybe is it 'cause of the motherboard or its LPT interface? :/

You may need to change the LPT operation mode in BIOS. I remember there being several of these from the ZIP drive days, so turning it into the slowest possible mode may help. Dunno.

I remember in transferring it took about 15 minutes. This includes formatting the disk and a full copy of its filesystem. Not sure if this is normal or slow, but it may help.

I used to have the pin assigments for the simple cable in my head, but that cable was too slow, so i switched to an MMC64 with fast copy plugin :)