Important breaking news!

Yeah yeah, i know I said this would be the last post for today, however I just read my emails and there was a post from Jim Brain announcing that his new webstore is now live. It is complete with pictures, descriptions and an easy ordering system.

http://www.jbrain.net/

What are you waiting for?!

One last post for today

In my post, "Year of the uIEC", i asked the question, "how do I get the images onto my hard drive?". Well, actually, I do have a plan for that. Infact, for quite some time i have had a plan with regards to migrating data from the pc to the uIEC. Yes, I have been holding out, my project still has another stage to go, heh. Actually, that was one of the reasons why I hadn't put the cover back on the drive!

More on this next week.

Knowledge is power

Anyone who would like more information can read the uIEC google group that Jim Brain set up. You'll see the questions and answers from those that own the devices, develope the firmware and write software.

http://groups.google.com.au/group/uIEC-users

To post you'll need to register, to read you won't.

Year of the uIEC

Just recently in the comp.sys.cbm newsgroup and via some other mailing lists i am on posts were made indicating that TPUG ( http://www.tpug.ca ) had made available their library of software, in .D64 format, on CD. How good is that!

As the uIEC can mount .D64 image files and then use them as though they a floppy disc in a 1541 disk drive, this means easy access to all that wonderful software without the need to extract it to a folder and mess around. I placed my order and am now eagerly awaiting my cd.

Now comes the interesting bit, once the cd arrives, how do I get the images onto my hard drive?

Happy New Year

2010. Benders favourite kind of dream.

There are two sides to every story

Here are the left and righthand sides of the casing where the cosmetic damage to the paintwork is most obvious.

Peeling away the years

No, I have not had a facial and don't intend too either. Nope, i'm talking about the continuation of my project which now enters the cleaning phase.

As I have said previously this drive was given to me in a rather aweful state, a state that I think came about from it being previously owned by or used in the vicinity of a heavy smoker. It also probably didn't help that it had been stored in a garage either. The outer casing which normally is an off white colour looked more like a chocolate brown colour, that then had dirty, greasy finger marks left on it.

The first thing I did was to soak it in a normal household cleaner for a while and then scrub it with one of those course, material based pot and pan scrubbers. I left it for a while and then wiped it over with a sponge and water, repeating the process a few times. That almost got the casing clean, but not quite, so this time I used Jiff and the pot scrubber. This removed the last of the dirt and the paintwork was once again that off white colour. Unfortunately there are quite a few scratches in the paintwork so it sure isn't perfect, however it looks heaps better than before.

Stupid me forgot to take a before picture, however here are the pics of the case, now cleaned.

Merry Xmas!

You said it's quick, how quick?

Giana Sisters is 166 blocks long. It took 4.78 seconds to load...

In the next post I will talk about how you go about setting the hard drive up for use with the C64.

Merry Xmas for those that choose to celebrate it!

Of course it must be tested along the way...

Giana Sisters is one of my all time favourite games. After the wiring was completed, the fake facia mounted and the cables were tidied up I thought some testing was in order.

So I turned on the Cardco.. Power LED, check! Turned on the C64 and made sure I could load a directory, yeap, check! MMMMmmm look at all those blocks free, heh. Ok, time to play !!


With JiffyDOS, navigating subdirectories, mounting .d64 images and loading is a simple and quick process. Long ago I had gone through all my floppy disc's and converted them into .D64 image file format. One of the things that appealed to me about the uIEC firmware was that it could mount these disk images, which means they are treated as if they were a floppy in a disk drive, neat!

Power Supply

The picture's i am about to supply are of the power supply and what it originally came with. For those that aren't aware, 3.5" hard drives require 12v and 5v to operate, and the uIEC requires 5v too. As i mentioned earlier a lack of technical documents on the original Cardco power supply, along with the suspect condition it was in forced me to look for an alternative.

A long time ago I imported a couple of SFD-1001s from the US (110v ac) into Australia (240v ac) and purchased three very nice, 90-250v ac input switch mode power supplies that provided the 5v and 12v rails the SFDs needed to operate. They fitted perfectly in the SFD case where the original transformer and rectifier boards were. I got a spare power supply should one happen to fail. Unfortunately I couldn't use it in the Cardo project because it was too large.

I had an old DVD player that I didn't use any more so I decided to use it's internal power supply. When I opened it up I saw it used a regular pc style floppy power connector, awesome.. Minutes later I measured it and once again, too large.

Once again while scrounging around in my cupboard o' junk ( i am a hoarder, luckily,heh ), I came across an old external cdrom drive which had an external power supply. Fortunately its outputs were 5v and 12v, provided via a round four pin connector. The matching sockets are readily available, so, at last, I had my power supply!

Typically, after deciding to use the old external cdrom power supply and wiring everything up I came across a faulty dvd player at work that a customer had said wouldn't read disc's. Out of curiosity I opened it up and it had an internal power supply that would have been ideal for this project, perfect size and would have been able to supply the right voltages and current, oh well, thats life!!

But where do I get one of these fantastic things

I hear you say... Well silly me, I have yet to mention that the uIEC is available in a couple of different variations, all of which plus other Commodore related hardware can be purchased from

http://www.jbrain.com

Jim Brain now has a license to sell JiffyDOS, well worth purchasing for a number of reasons not the least is that the uIEC firmware supports the speeder, and having the dos wedge makes life with a hard drive (and floppy drive for that matter) much more bearable. Once you have JiffyDOS for your C64 it would be a good idea to equip your floppy drive with the matching JiffyDOS rom so transfering files from your disc's to your new hard drive will be quick and painless.

Check out his website, there are lots of goodies there..

It's not as floppy as it would seem!

My idea of the Retro uIEC was coming along nicely, however I wasn't happy with the front of the drive. When the Cardco was originally manufactured it had a 5.25" floppy, and now that this particular unit contained a hard drive, the hole where the drive mechanism facia was originally was now empty. I put a blanking plate there, the kind that come with most PC cases, but it just didn't look right. There wasn't enough room to put the original mech back, it would have fouled against the hard drive, unless I moved it and I didn't want to remount it anyway unless I absolutely had to. So I left the blanking plate in there while I worked on other things, and, as often happens when you have your mind on other bits and pieces I remembered I had some old 5.25" 360k pc floppy drives in my parts cupboard.

Opening it up revealed a number of old drives and while most of them had facia's that didn't look quite like what I was after, one of them did! Looking at the drive I knew it wouldn't fit, however that was never my plan. I looked at how the facia was attached to the mechanism body, and if the two could be removed at all.

Good news everybody! (Sorry, i'm a Futurama fan,heh). This particular drive had it facia held in place by two screws and two clips, and, as a bonus, the drive activity LED was connected to the controller pcb by a two pin header socket. I had already removed the LEDs from the uIEC PCB and replaced them with header plugs, so the facia activity LED would connect to the IDE activity header, perfect!

So, I now have a 5.25" drive facia intact with it's activity led, the only thing I had to do was glue on the clamping lever as there now was nothing for it to be held in place by. Once the glue had dried I had what looked like a standard drive mechanism, except it was only the plastic facia ready to be mounted, somehow, in the Cardo.

While I haven't decided on how I will permanently fix it in place I have temporarily glued two metal tabs on it that extended inwards and reach the hard drive, which they are attached to with some double sided tape.

Once the new facia was mounted in place all that was left to do was connect the facia's activity led and the Cardco's power led to their respective headers on the uIEC pcb. That done, it was time to connect the drive up and give it a test.

Above is a picture of the drive loading a directory.

Looking at it now I realise it might have been more realistic to have the clamping lever verticle rather than horizontal, oh well, I still like it!

Next will be work on the facia mounting, put the cover back on and then give it a bit of a clean. Like I said previously this drive had a hard life in the hands of a previous owner, some marks won't clean off, but at least it will look a bit nicer when given a once over with some appropriate cleaning products.

When I have done that i'll post pics. Oh, and i'll post some pics of what I used to power the drive in coming days too.

Enough for tonight though...

It's the little things that count

Tonight I didn't get to spend as much time on this project as I would like. Pretty much all I did was tidy up and secure the wiring, oh, and play a few rounds of Giana Sisters, heh.

Here are the pics showing all the of wiring in it's finished state. I don't really anticipate changing anything in that area now, it works, it's neat and i'm happy with it.

Well it's dinner time now.. I might upload some more photo's later tonight.

Mounting the hard drive

Now that the uIEC PCB is secured in place and the wiring complete it was time to put the hard drive in. I decided that I would use a standard hard drive/dvd drive type floppy power connector as the basis for providing power internally, as you can see. I had an old power pass through lead that had a 5v tap off (it was in my junk box, no idea what it was originally used for) so I used that to supply power to the uIEC. The twisted brown and white lead provides power to the green power led mounted on the front panel of the casing. The two photo's above show the before and after shots.

Picture from above

This shows the location of the uIEC pcb inside the Cardco's casing.

You can also see two sets of header pins where the power and ide activity leds used to be, along with my wiring.

More tomorow.
mike

Break out the screw drivers and drill

Once the decision had been made to put the uIEC into the Cardco case I had to remove the old drive mech, controller pcb and finally the power supply pcb. With the bare shell in front of me I removed the two brackets that hold the mech in place and modified them to accept the width of a normal 5.25" device, because, as anyone that has played with 1541s knows, the drive mech mount recepticles are indented, and the Cardco uses the same style mech.

That done, the next thing to decide was where will I mount the uIEC and how will I power the whole thing. As I wasn't sure of the current rating of the Cardco PSU and the fact that it looked like it was in need of some work, I decided an external power supply would be the prefered option. While looking around for something suitable in my storage cupboard I found an old external cdrom drive that had a suitably rated power supply, and, as a bonus, used a standard four pin plug with a readily available socket for its connection, bingo!!

Now that there was no internal power supply taking up space I could fit the uIEC anywhere I wanted and I decided that it would be mounted in such a way that the IEC socket on it would line up with one of the two holes in the casing originally used for the Cardco controllers IEC ports. I located the pcb in the spot, marked four holes that line up with four holes on the uIEC pcb and drilled them out. As I was going for an original look I kept the original power supply switch and fitted the four pin dc socket where the fuse holder originally went. This leaves the hole for the mains cord and one unused IEC port hole unused, i'll blank them off eventually.

Here is a picture I took of the back panel after the modifications had been performed.

More to come tomorow.

Retro Upgrade

When the uIEC arrived I decided not to re-use the external cdrom housing and started thinking of what I would use. My first thought was to buy an external hard drive casing and use that, it would be small, look neat and came with a power supply which would not only power the hard drive but the interface as well. Problem is most of these devices now are so small, barely bigger than the hard drive itself, that fitting the interface would be problematic.

My next idea was to use a NAS drive housing. Where I work we were sent dummy cases to have on display so people could see what our NAS drives looked like, these were real cases however there was no drive or electronics inside, perfect!! As we no longer stocked one particular brand I decided to see if the dummy was still in our storeroom.... It wasn't. Someone had a cleaned it up and thrown away alot of unused bits, it was one.

So, where to next? Then I remembered years ago being given a badly damaged Cardco CSD-1, or for you Australians out there, a SKYE 64. It was beyond repair and I was only keeping it for parts, so I decided I would gut the housing and put the pcb and all parts in a safe place while giving the case a new purpose in life!

What follows will be a brief run down of how I went about it, with pictures.

I hope it's interesting :)

Mike

The journey begins!

Jim brain's uIEC project has interested me for some time, the idea of versatile, easy to use mass storage for the C64 has always appealed to me. My first hard drive was a CMD HD40 that I got from Ebay. A nice device, mated with my JiffyDOS equiped C64 it did its job well.

Then I became aware of the IDE64. Promises of quicker than CMD loading times and the ability to connect standard IDE hard drives and CD-Rom drives was too tempting to not explore. I ordered mine and while waiting for it to arrive dug out an old external cdrom case that had enough room to fit a 2.5" ide hard drive along with the existing cdrom drive, removed the usb controller board and modified the casing so I could pass a round ide cable out the back. Once the IDE64 arrived I hooked it all up, formatted the hard drive and went about copying all the files from the CMD HD and various floppies. Unfortunately the IDE64 is a cartridge and doesn't like any program that messes around with zero page and some other locations, so incompatability with certain programs was something I was going to have to live with, that and the fact it is rather long and has no casing so some care must be taken with it.

Fast forward a few years and Jim Brain starts development of his uIEC, an IDE interface that connects to the IEC port, just like the majority of Commodore equipment does. Already i'm interested, because it means I could get rid of the massive IDE64 interface.

Fast forward a bit more, uIEC CF/IDE is released. It is tiny, runs of 5v, has an dual channel ide interface, complactflash card reader and firmware which makes this perhaps the most versatile ide interface available. With it's ability to work with the JiffyDOS speed loader, mount .D64 images as if they were subdirectories and support all the JiffyDOS wedge commands it was too good to resist, I ordered one.

Ok, so that's a little background on the mass storage devices for those that have been living in a cave for the past few years, along with my experience with them. On to the fun stuff!