New Commodore 128About 3 weeks ago I found a new toy online 🙂 Meet my new Commodore 128 & 1541 Disk Drive. Both are in really excellent shape, and the 1541 is pretty much brand new, it doesn’t have a fingerprint on it! At the same time that I got the machine, I also went ahead and bought an XA1541 transfer unit, which connects to a regular PC, or a 1541 Commodore disk drive and acts like the device itself.

If connected to the 1541, the PC can transfer disk images back and forth between the drive, handy for making backups, copying downloaded images back to floppy, so they can be ran on the C128.

Software exists to connect the 1541 directly to the C128, however I wasn’t able to get it to work, so I may have to build a special DOS box in the future and try it again. The software is quite old and might not even work with this particular adapter.

Information on the adapter, and others in the series which can connect to various commodore devices, can be found on the following site: http://sta.c64.org/xa1541.html This is an open design, anyone can freely made it, although I chose to pay a fee and bought mine pre-built as I can’t solder to save my life 🙂

After playing with the new setup, it was very handy for transferring SID files to disk for playing on the real machine. Its funny to me just how used to emulated recordings I became, as the real SID versions quite often sound very different. I will eventually record some of these and put them on CVGM.net.

I plan to use this computer to do a bit of coding in the future as well, so expect a small intro or some other piece of coding poop to come from me soon! Meanwhile, some additional images!

XA1541 C128 running 'BatPlot' by Adam West Group