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!