You really can't use a PC as a floppy drive- the parallel port timing is not good enough, even under DOS (realtime). There have been solutions that sort of worked, but not well.

Those cables are for attaching an old PC to a disk drive for reading/writing disks.

For storage, the least expensive way is to get (or build) and sd2iec device. They are also not disk drive emulation (they are more like a CMD hard drive emulator) but you can still run most things.

You have to look what the software you want to use supports.

I have a X1541 cable and use 64hdd.

The free version only support normal loading (standard kernel, no fastloader)

But x1541 does not work with each mainboard, bios and maybe not on faster cpu's. (parallelport much be set to standard, normal, or spp in bios)

I use it with an mainboard from a siemens pc, with a 500mhz Pentium3.
Also sucessfully tested with a Pentium 1 200Mhz.

And a cable may not be much cheaper then a SD2IEC.

But, the cable can later also used to write images from pc to 1541-II or a Tape.

Thanks...
This is more or less the same answers I got on Lemon64. The route I want to go, is the route of 64HDD on a Dos computer.
The only difference, is that on Lemon64, a user have adviced me to use an XM-1541 cable and not the X-1541 cable.
I will buy an SD2IEC instead then. Only have to wait untill next month. Thanks for the advices. 😀

Yep I looked into the alternatives a while back and ended up just diving in and buying a 1541 Ultimate II, which I've grown to love with all my heart.

My experience with a C64 was that it had issues after being in storage for years, but they're easy (and fun!) to fix. Finding a solution for a safe PSU was the biggest challenge I found.

badmojo wrote:

Finding a solution for a safe PSU was the biggest challenge I found.

What solution did you find? Something other than Ray Carlsen's PSU?

Tim1075 wrote:

What solution did you find? Something other than Ray Carlsen's PSU?

I just made one out of off the shelf power packs in the end: Commodore 64 revival (warning, wall of pics)

I also have a C128 PSU with an adapter which works fine, but it has the old Commodore PSU hum that bothers me, and it's still very old hardware these days.

badmojo wrote:

I just made one out of off the shelf power packs in the end: Commodore 64 revival (warning, wall of pics)

I also have a C128 PSU with an adapter which works fine, but it has the old Commodore PSU hum that bothers me, and it's still very old hardware these days.

Yes, I have a simular experience. For the moment I am still using my C64c powerbrick but it generates quite a lot of heat so I have been searching for an appropriate replecement. Ray Carlsen's PSU looks excellent but the price and especially shipping charges put me off. I also bought a first generation adapter from retrogamesupply but it generates an annoying hum that resonates to the speaker 🙁 while pasting the url I see that there is a second generation PSU for twice the price though.

I will look into your solution. At first glance it looks like an affordable alternative. Thanks!