TPUG CD

My TPUG CD arrived yesterday although I wasn't able to do anything with it due to time constraints. Anyway, today I copied the contents of the C64 folder to my CF card and inserted that into my Cardco uIEC. I started looking through some of the communications D64 images and realised that looking through all these disk images will take some time, but i'll have alot of fun doing it, however it will have to wait until I have some more time.

I'll post a photo of the CD, it looks cool :)

You US and Canadian Commodore users don't realise how lucky you were to have a user group such as TPUG, in Australia, well where I live in Australia we never had any such groups.
The availability of such a library of software would have been awesome, not to mention the other resources too.

For me and most of the people I knew all our support came from local BBS's, and utility software was scarce because it had no way to get "down under", except by someone calling a US BBS at great cost (international calls were so expensive here in the 80s), so we didn't have anywhere near the variety or availability of software.

Thats it for tonight :)

I know...

.... Still haven't cleaned up the facia :)

Igor, it lives!

Since screwing the thing back together I haven't had alot of time to use my C64, however I did play a few rounds of Giana Sisters, fired up a few demos and ran the odd program.

After reading that a new firmware update was released I downloaded it, copied it onto the CF card and then plugged the CF card into the Cardo. To do a firmware update you must have the .bin file in the root directory of the first partition of the master drive. My CF is configured as a slave device, so I needed to copy it from the CF to the HD. This is where I ran into a little trouble, I hadn't used JiffyDOS in a while and had forgotten what the appropriate commands where, and when I briefly looked on the net I wasn't able to find a suitable file manager. So out came the JD manual and eventually I found what I was looking for.

That done, I rebooted the Cardco and the activity light blinked just like the instructions for firmware updating said it would. Reboot again and check the error channel, all good, all up to date :)

It does raise the question of file managers though. I had nothing in my collection and a brief search on the net didnt provide any answers. Does anyone out there know of a decent file manager? Ideally something with split windows for source/destination, where you can tag the file(s) you wan't to send to the destination drive. Please leave a comment if you are aware of such a program.

Anyway, so far so good. I'll take a photo of it installed with the rest of my Commodore gear and post it in a few days.

Bolting it all together

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you, The Cardco FDS-1 uIEC HD+CF!

Good news everybody! (another Futurama saying)

I have finished tidying up the wiring, all glues have dried and finally, the outter casing has now been put back on and screwed into position.

Another step closer

This is a photo of the Cardco with it's facia surround back in place, the 5 1/4" facia mounted in place and the CF IDE adaptor mounted behind it. A 2g CF card is inserted, giving you an idea of what it looks like when a card is being used.

Still havent got around to cleaning that paint or whatever it is off the facia surround...

I'll post more pics tomorow if I can, or in the next couple of days.

What I forgot to tell you

Last night, before finishing up, I decided to test the CF IDE adaptor. I plugged in an old 32mb CF card, turned on the drive, turned on the 64 and tried to access the card. Nothing.

Aftering checking jumpers, moving jumpers, testing the card in a pc, checking wiring and spending way longer than I had realised I was still not able to access the card. The hard drive was fine, no probs there, but the card, nope.

So tonight, before I did anything, i decided to work that out. This time I connected it up to my PC using an IDE to USB adaptor, plugged into the CF to IDE adaptor. Nothing. I even tried a different CF card, a more modern 2gb unit, nope, nothing.

I decided that maybe the USB adaptor was causing a problem in the test, so I connected the CF IDE directly to an IDE port on my PC, set it to master, and bingo! it works!

Feeling cocky, I decided to run an ide lead from the hard drive I was using , to the CF IDE and then finally into the PC. With the hard drive set as master and the CF IDE as slave I was was able to see both units in Windows on my PC.

So, knowing that I had the cabling and master/slave jumper arrangements taken care of, I disconnected the lot from the PC and reconnected them to the uIEC controller, applied power, turned on the c64 and.............. NO CF CARD, ARRRgghh!!!

It was at this point I decided it was a uIEC issue, most likely I figured, I had not set it up correctly for two IDE devices.

So off I went to the uIEC google group and started going through the previous posts when I came across a post from Jim Brain saying you have to configure uIEC to look for a second IDE device with the @"XD1=1" command, followed by @"XW" to save the new configuration.

Sure enough, after issuing that command and power cycling the uIEC and issuing the JiffyDOS command @$=P I was greeted with the above!

Ok, so it makes sense, the volume label for the hard drive is C64 and the volume label for the CF card is STUFF.

It all works!!

The next step is to screw it all together properly and put the case back on, finally, so it looks like a regular c64 drive. Now the fun stuff starts, I get to use it, hehe.

Oops, forgot the pic

I was in such a hurry to eat dinner I forgot to post the picture of the CF IDE adaptor mounted behind the drive facia, so here it is.

Yesterdays work

Monday's task was to work out the mounting arrangements for the CompactFlash adaptor. Initially I thought I could secure it to the old floppy drive facia somehow, maybe by glueing a plate onto it and then using the pcb standoff holes to fix the adaptor to that. Nope, I could see various problems with that idea. In the end, after thinking through a few other ideas, I decided I would use long, tapped pcb spacers. I had heaps of various sizes in stock so after measuring the height the adaptor needed to be to align it's CF socket with the slot in the facia for the 5 1/4" floppy, I came up with the right combination of spacers for the height required.

So out came the hard drive and facia and I drilled two holes in the chasis. I also had to modify the drive rails because one side fouled the pcb of the CF IDE adaptor, so out came my trusty nibbling tool. I also needed my dremel to remove some plastic on the inside of the facia as it wasn't allowing the adaptor pcb to sit up against the facia properly. I then temporarily mounted the pcb and facia to test my measurements, and, yay, they were 100%, everything was aligned nicely. So the dremel, tin snips, drill, nibbler and other tools were packed away and it was back to the house to put the hard drive and facia back in and then test CF IDE adaptor...

That post will come next, after dinner :)