Hello everyone.

When I started my #retrocomputing journey i knew that i would end up with a floppy drive at some point. Had to upgrade from tapes right? One thing i was always unsure of was would i be able to really put it to use. Well when i went looking for a drive i also looked for floppies. Luckily i did find some NOS floppies. Now i had to find a way to get some content on them. In comes the Pi1541. This lovely project turns a Raspberry Pi into a 1541 disk drive. It actually emulates the 1541 in a cycle perfect way. This changed everything for me. With this it was now like i had 2 1541 drives.

So using VIC 2 disk backup i was now able to take a D64 disk image and write it to a real floppy. The software requires at least 16k of memory expansion. It can also use 24k. The way it works is actually quite simple. Here is what the software does.

1. Prompts for a disk name and ID
2. Format the new disk.
3. Read in as many blocks as the available memory will allow
4. Write those blocks to the floppy.

Repeat 3-4 till all blocks are copied.

It works fairly well. I’ve not had it fail on me yet. I’ve captured a small but probably uninteresting video of the process.

If you have a system compatible with the commodore 1541 disk drive you should get yourself a Pi1541. I can’t directly compare it to regular SD2IEC devices as i’ve not used those. But this thing works great. Now i can load DOOM from a real floppy (-:

Also just a little housekeeping. Its been a while since i posted again. Things are slowing down here and i might find myself with extra free time on my hands. That might turn into more posts again. I'll also acknowledge my failure to complete the 100 days to offload challenge. I'm a little disappointed but at the same time it did get me to write more posts. If only for a short period of time.

Well that's all for now

Until next time. Stay safe!

G @mgrondin@youdabomb.social

So this is something i have been wanting to get into for a while. #RetroComputing. I could never find the right listing at the right price. Well this time when i went looking all was right and i scored a (what i consider) mint condition VIC-20. Also got a tape drive for it, some educational software on tape and a couple cart games.

See pics here

So now what to do with this. Well i discovered that there is still an active community of people making games for this system so that's been fun. Downloading games and converting to a format that i can then record to cassette since that's the only way i have(for now) of getting things to/from the VIC. That's worked out pretty well so far. I have also found Compute Gazette on archive.org and have embarked on a semi quest of archiving the program listings from them. I'll document that better here some day but for now you can find .tap files of what I've done here. I'll also post it all over on the Denial forum(linked above) under the games section.

I have also made .tap files for the above mentioned educational software.

That's all for now.

Till next time. Be safe!

@mgrondin@youdabomb.social

Until next time. Stay safe!

G @mgrondin@youdabomb.social