VOGONS


First post, by ahendricks18

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Hey guys,
Just wanted to know if this is possible; copying games to a C64 over a serial connection to the C64's disks/tape. I am using fedora linux 22 on the computer to send the files and a C64 to receive the files. I would like to know before I go out and buy parts for building new cable, or a new cable itself. I am not sure of the best way to copy over games. I doubt you could use fedora to copy files to a 5.25 floppy, but if anyone has done it I'd like to hear. None of my local pawn shops have C64 games and I don't want to order off ebay. Let me know, -A

Main: AMD FX 6300 six core 3.5ghz (OC 4ghz)
16gb DDR3, Nvidia Geforce GT740 4gb Gfx card, running Win7 Ultimate x64
Linux: AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 1.5GB DDR, Nvidia Quadro FX1700 running Debian Jessie 8.4.0

Reply 1 of 5, by Scali

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I don't know of any software that makes this possible. The disk images are raw images, and need to be written to an entire disk at once.
But if you're going to build a cable anyway, look into an X1541 cable.
This is a cable that connects the parallel port of a PC directly to a 1541 drive. With software such as Star Commander, you can write the images directly from your PC to your 1541.
I built one many years ago. Mind you, there are multiple variations. I have the oldest/simplest variation, which only works with very old parallel ports (486/Pentium era).

Alternatively, you could look at a 1541Ultimate cartridge. It takes an SD card or USB stick with disk images, which it can mount directly. It emulates a 1541 disk drive, so you don't actually need to transfer it to a physical disk (although you could, because you could copy from the emulated drive to a real drive).

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/just-keeping-it- … ro-programming/

Reply 2 of 5, by AnacreonZA

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I've been doing this quite recently and it's not that complicated. You will need to build that X1541 cable in order to connect a C64 drive to a PC parallel port - I've never seen anything that uses the serial port. It may be tricky to find a new PC with a parallel port these days but I'm sure someone on this forum wouldn't have trouble at all. I use my Socket 7 K6 machine for this purpose. Star Commander is the software I use to transfer disk images and it works well.

Since my 1541 drive is faulty at the moment I made a parallel port cable for my tape drive as well to transfer .tap files. I got the information from this site: http://markus.brenner.de - I use ptap to write my .tap files from my PC to blank tapes quite reliably - depending on the quality of the tape as finding new ones today is difficult.

I used a piece of one-sided unetched PC board and cut some grooves into it to allow me to plug it into the socket on the end of the tape drive cable. I then soldered in the lines to a +5v PSU and the lines out to the LPT port on the PC. The diagram there also includes connections for the 1541 drive, but I found that those are not necessary on a cable made purely to connect a tape drive.

If you want to spend more money then there are two CF card solutions - SD2IEC and 1541 Ultimate. They are the best way to do this but are obviously more expensive than a simple cable solution.

You won't find any software to allow you to directly write C64 disks in a PC drive as PC drives use MFM encoding and the C64's disks are encoded with GCR encoding which is completely incompatible. Also the C64 disks spin at two different speeds depending on where the head is on the disk so that's another barrier. The only way to do this is with a dedicated low-level disk drive controller card like the Kryoflux - which is even more expensive than the CF solutions.

Reply 3 of 5, by Sammy

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You can use ptap an mtap with the X1541 cable also.
This works better for me, the Tape has less errors.

Connect Tape-Drive to c64.
Connect X1541 cable between Serial-port of C64 and LPT port.

The run TAPSERV software on C64.

C64 receives Data from PC and Writes them to Tape.

Or reads from tape and sends them to PC if you make an Image from Tape.

Reply 4 of 5, by ahendricks18

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What about using 2 modems? I have a 56k Usrobotics winmodem in my main PC. I asked on the fedora linux forums and someone suggested i use modems. Id have to order a cheap modem for my C64 though.

Main: AMD FX 6300 six core 3.5ghz (OC 4ghz)
16gb DDR3, Nvidia Geforce GT740 4gb Gfx card, running Win7 Ultimate x64
Linux: AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 1.5GB DDR, Nvidia Quadro FX1700 running Debian Jessie 8.4.0

Reply 5 of 5, by ahendricks18

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Well I think the obvious choice is the x1541 cable. I popped into radioshack just now and bought a male db25. Too bad they didn't have the DIN6 for the C64 end, I'll get that off of Jameco. Thanks for all the info guys, I appreciate it.

P.S.
I read you have to use an older PC with the parallel port. Something about even the new ones that have LPT ports dont emulate it right? Anyway not a problem, I'll use my Pentium 1.

Main: AMD FX 6300 six core 3.5ghz (OC 4ghz)
16gb DDR3, Nvidia Geforce GT740 4gb Gfx card, running Win7 Ultimate x64
Linux: AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 1.5GB DDR, Nvidia Quadro FX1700 running Debian Jessie 8.4.0