joeybastard Posted May 30, 2003 Share Posted May 30, 2003 I found plans to make a cable to go from PC parallel port to the C64 DD and some software to transfer c64 games from my PC. Has anybody ever made one of these and if so, was it hard? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oesii Posted May 30, 2003 Share Posted May 30, 2003 I was too lazy and just spent like $15 to get one on eBay. There's some people in the C64 scene who also can make the cables for you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joeybastard Posted May 30, 2003 Author Share Posted May 30, 2003 Does the one you have work well? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ze_ro Posted May 30, 2003 Share Posted May 30, 2003 I made one myself, and it worked pretty well. The transfers were always fairly slow though. My brother ended up modifying some of the 1541's we have so that they have a parallel connector on them... using this parallel connector, you can copy things a LOT faster. The one I built was the X1541 cable, but there's a number of others that you can make (XA1541, XE1541, and the XM1541). If you're new at making cables, the X1541 is probably the easiest to make, since you don't need any diodes or anything... all you have to do is cut open a parallel printer cable and a C64 serial cable and splice them together (This is what I did). Everything else requires extra pieces, but has greater abilities. For example, I think you need to have your parallel port in SPP mode to use the X1541 cable, and I don't think you can use it in Windows, since it requires very precise timing that Windows can't do. The XM1541 cable is harder to build, but I think you can use it safely in any parallel port mode, and from within Windows. In any case, you'll probably want to look through this page for more information. There's also links there on where to buy these cables premade. Anyways, they work really well, and I'm glad I built one. I've made many disks from .d64 images. Plus, I was able to use the same cable to hook the C64 itself up to a computer, and run a program on the PC that would act as a server for the C64. By doing this, I could access the PC's hard drive from the C64 as if it was a regular disk drive. It was pretty sweet except that the computer had a dead CMOS battery, so it constantly forgot it's bios settings unless I left it turned on the whole time. --Zero Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oesii Posted May 30, 2003 Share Posted May 30, 2003 Mine is an XE1541, works great and it seems faster than the stock disk drives but I haven't had one of those hooked up in 20 years Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joeybastard Posted May 30, 2003 Author Share Posted May 30, 2003 Thanks! I'll do a little research and start building! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MegaManFan Posted May 31, 2003 Share Posted May 31, 2003 How hard is it to make .d64 images if the disks have a lot of copyright protection (intentionally bad blocks or sectors, et cetera)? I'd love to back up all my old Commodore software before bit-rot gets it all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oesii Posted May 31, 2003 Share Posted May 31, 2003 How hard is it to make .d64 images if the disks have a lot of copyright protection (intentionally bad blocks or sectors, et cetera)? I'd love to back up all my old Commodore software before bit-rot gets it all. I haven't personally done this but I'm very sure that 99.5% of all C64 games and programs have been already dumped onto the internet, so you can just start backing them up for posterity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ze_ro Posted May 31, 2003 Share Posted May 31, 2003 How hard is it to make .d64 images if the disks have a lot of copyright protection? Generally, it's not possible. There's a LOT of goofy tricks that are used in copy protection on the C64, and most of them can't be properly done on a .d64 image. Some games do things like reading "half-tracks" where there isn't supposed to be any information at all. And I'm fairly sure that .d64's can't hold error information that protection schemes use very often. However, there IS a format that can handle this. It's called a .g64 file, and it's basically a straight dump of the GCR formatting of the disk. There's a program called mnib that can be used to make these images, and I believe that some emulators (VICE comes to mind) support them. From reading the mnib homepage though, it doesn't look like you can transfer a .g64 image back onto an actual disk, so it won't work that well for backup purposes. Of course, if you look around, you can probably find cracked copies of pretty much any C64 game. My brother used to do a lot of stuff with mnib because he was disappointed with the slow load times on cracked games, since they usually had to hack out the speed loaders in the process of removing copy protection. --Zero Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayhem Posted May 31, 2003 Share Posted May 31, 2003 You can also create G64 from using a program called 6PAK on the C64 to make 6 image files of a C64 disc side. You can then transfer over these images to the PC and use a program there called S2G to turn these into an G64. This method has more success than normal d64 conversion, but less success than the MNIB route. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MegaManFan Posted May 31, 2003 Share Posted May 31, 2003 This all sounds incredible time-consuming and PITA to do anyway, so I think I'll say bugger to the whole thing. If my disks rot, they rot. The only ones I'd regret losing is all the games I hand-typed in from Ahoy! and Compute's Gazette (I had about 200-300 on two different disks). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ze_ro Posted June 1, 2003 Share Posted June 1, 2003 Well, type-in games have no copy protection, so making .d64's out of them should be no problem at all. As for stuff like California Games and any others, if they die, just download a cracked version off the net, and make yourself a new disk. --Zero Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MegaManFan Posted June 1, 2003 Share Posted June 1, 2003 Yes, but here's my point - this seems cost prohibitive; ordering parts and making a cable just to back up two disks full of games I typed in. I'd actually rather send the disks to an AA user I could trust, if they'd be willing to make the .d64 files and send them to me, at which point they could keep the disks anyway. I'd even trade a loose Atari game for the time and effort. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gunstar Posted June 1, 2003 Share Posted June 1, 2003 I'll be making one of these soon for my C128 and using the server software with the PC too! Just like my Atari and SIO2PC/10502PC cable and A.P.E software! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayhem Posted June 1, 2003 Share Posted June 1, 2003 Yes, but here's my point - this seems cost prohibitive; ordering parts and making a cable just to back up two disks full of games I typed in. I'd actually rather send the disks to an AA user I could trust, if they'd be willing to make the .d64 files and send them to me, at which point they could keep the disks anyway. I'd even trade a loose Atari game for the time and effort. Well I don't have a problem doing this... I have my StarCom PC (aka the mighty 486) connected up to the same monitor this PC is connected to. Great things, digital and analog connections PM me if you want to arrange anything... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ApolloBoy Posted June 15, 2003 Share Posted June 15, 2003 I just happen to have a C64-to-PC cable I found among my dad's old C64 stuff. One end connects to the user port on the back of the C64, and the other end connects to the parallel port on the PC. I also found some C64 games on 3.5 inch floppies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ze_ro Posted June 15, 2003 Share Posted June 15, 2003 I don't think that's the same thing... the cables we're talking about generally connect to the parallel port of a computer, and to the serial port of the C64 or 1541, not the user port. Not sure what your cord is meant for though... maybe for connecting printers or something? --Zero Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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