11.16.2009

1541EMU & Type 1 cable

As I promised here is the fist article on my 3 C64 projects. Rationale behind the decision to go for 1541EMU was explained in a news teaser earlier this summer. Building the type 1 cable is fairly simple but time consuming. Around 4-6h of work with 30 or so solder points. I haven't soldered this much on a single build since I was in school! I built 2 cables that ended up costing little over 7€ a piece so price is not an issue. Instructions on the 1541EMU site are bare essentials. The wiring schematic looks confusing and hard and slow to follow especially to an electronic drawing layman like me. I hot glued the IC's together as instructed but I don't think that's necessary since you have to solder the IC's together from 3 points anyway.



Assembly of the 6 pin 270° DIN connector is straight forward.
Most the time is spent on the LPT connector and IC connections.
As you can see the 2 LPT ends were wired a little differently. The "around the IC's" wiring looks nicer.




Since modern computers don't have a midi/game port I substituted that connection with a USB connector that draws power for the IC's.
After the assembly was complete and I checked the wiring for errors the big question on my mind was "How do I know if this works correctly?"



1541EMU site talks about some crazy poke commands but the best test I could think off was to try the cable.
1541EMU recognizes if a cable is connected and its type. I quickly mounted a .d64 image and loaded a game from my new "1541 drive".
I tried to create a new disk for a save test but the out of the box configuration prevented this and I had to change this in the .ini file.
Crated a game save and loaded it from the virtual diskette.
Everything worked flawlessly!!!




I did try to run 1541EMU in vista 64 and XP 32 but it refused to work.
Transferring data to a real DOS machine is a challenge. CD support is not there out of the box. DVD support for DOS might exist. you can get networking to run with lanman or some other way but does your NIC come with dos drivers?
I didn't feel like spending hours on trying to get DOS to "follow the times" so I just installed XP as a second OS and do all my file transferring from there. a LIVE CD/DVD might also do the trick but they are SO SLOW to boot so a dual boot configuration is a lot more convenient.

I highly recommend 1541EMU!
The only down side for some is the special cable that is not sold anywhere and has to be built but other than that 1541EMU is a dream come true!
Double thumbs up from Testi3!


No comments: