I love that you put work, blood, sweat & dog tears into even videos on topics as nerdy and obscure as this. Also that 64 & disk drive look so tiny in your hands, that dog must be gigantic. :)
ℹ️ Thanks for watching! Since this video was made I now have an even simpler method for Windows, not requiring Linux! 🎉 See the 6 steps here: www.perifractic.com/takeout-shop/1541-mini/. I've also seen a few comments suggesting Windows 10 Subsystem for Linux - sadly it doesn't support accessing block device files. Good luck and may the floppy (or stiffy) be with you!....
Trying Ubuntu in a virtual machine is a great way to start. After a while one can install it to the hard disk alongside Windows and chose either at boot up.
@Critter Hunter I just saw your other comment. That really means a lot to me. Thank you, and I'm glad the video (and the mystical music) is hitting the right note in today's world.
I lived in South Africa when I was a kid, and the first time I had a computer lesson I got the giggles when the teacher said he'd be passing a stiffy round the class.
Lol, the kids cheering increasingly higher pitch was hilarious. Good job figuring that out. I'm afraid I'm just not clever enough to figure stuff like that out. Please say hello to your family 🙂 Including all your furry babies. Cheers, Retro recipes.
At 8:13 you almost selected Bop 'n' Rumble! Love that silly very non P.C. game, would probably raise a few eyebrows these days... great video as always!
Great timing! I was just researching whether it would be possible to use an Arduino or RPi as a "passthrough" device to make my C64 mini think the floppy drive was just a very slow, low-capacity flash drive. I'm glad to hear that there's now a workaround for those of us who don't have a Mac!
Yes in South Africa it's called a Stiffy ... this actually got my friend in BIG trouble in the UK in 1996 when he worked there as a software engineer. He needed some 3.5 floppies (We called it a stiffy cause it is a stiff - "hard" NOT a floppy, any more...make sense? doesn't it) so he asked a beautiful "PA girl" to please give him a stiffy, he really needs one as he did not have one for months....then he said maybe she must give him three cause he don't want to bother her too much. well his response was a sexual harassment charge ... now that was explained with difficulty !!!
*LOVED THIS PROJECT!* Thank you for doing a follow up. Just wished there wasn't that extra step, but at least there's a solution out there for Win10 machines. Perfect episode length THX...
Now all you need to do is emulate the "blistering" speed of a 1541 drive to really go retro. They probably don't call a hard drive anything. They just enjoy its vibrations.
Haha Puppyfractic and her whistle once again is the bright spot of my day, and i have to say your jokes are getting better as well . Great video as alway guys keep up the great work and with the added bonus of some Rob Hubbard music. Catch you on the next one stay safe :-)
I'm thinking I might adapt the design to use a regular-size (4" x 1" high) 3.5" floppy drive: there are USB adapter boards available on ebay that can be used to convert a 3.5" floppy drive for USB operation, and the taller drive would fit the look of the 1541 a little better I think. (Though on second though - trying to get it properly proportioned around a taller drive might make the model even larger.. Dunno, might be worth a try.)
I installed the mac os on vmware workstation 15 using windows 10 then used a usb floppy mounted on Mac to format the disk and it worked great I copy some .d64 images to the floppy and it worked fine on the c64 mini and C64 max
I'd kind of forgotten we used to call those discs, "stiffies." I got confused when they became common for PCs (Amiga users were generally using them long before they were the default format) and people called them floppies. I think the logic was the physical form of the unit rather than making the distinction between the actual disc inside vs. a hard disc.
I absolutely know what you mean about the 1581 not being as nostalgic as the 1541... It was a pretty awesome drive though. 800K on a floppy disk felt like a ton of space for a C128. I wish the platform could have just used the 1581, honestly - but of course, so much of the C128 was all about that C64 compatibility, so we had to have those 5.25" disks...
Glad to see Linux usage but hearing that he made dd work on windows and not on Linux made me grin big, oh well maybe next time, do not give up, it's worth it)
Puppyfractic is such a sweetie, and has good comedy timing. She makes the perfect Abbott to your Costello. (Or for the younger gaming viewer, the perfect Tails to your Sonic.)
I just reminded me that back in the day if I setup a windows computer and put my initials in as my user name the computer would boot up for the first time with a user name "System". My initials are MBR.
These 1541 mini episodes were pretty awesome. Thanks for making the files free on Thingiverse too! I was going to suggest, for your next project, to find an internal 5 1/4 inch disk drive and put it in an actual (broken) 1541 drive and do the same thing. But i realised that would be a cabling issue, since 5 1/4 inch usb drives don't really exist. But if you could get it to work in Windows/Mac, would formatting also be an issue? Cheers!
@@RetroRecipes Yeah i saw that too, after I wrote my initial comment. (Here: www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html ) Oh well. Maybe one day Retro Games will release one so we can use our original disks!
I think the problem is down to the IBM PC hfloppy drive controller, they were hard coded to only work with MS-DOS formatted disks, so that'ss all Windows will do. Other computers like the Amiga had tools like CrossDos which allowed the Amiga to read and write (and even format) disks to formats intended for other computers. PCs required a special floppy disk controller (I think it was called the Catweasel) to use floppies from other computers.
I do not have a Mac. I used a friend's Mac to format several diskettes. I use a USB connector on an Android phone to copy and move files. It works great and you do not need Linux. Thanks for the idea to do this.
Hi Christophe, I cannot get formatting to work on the Samsung S10. Did you use any special software to format the disks using Android? Or did you just use Android for file copying only? Thanks.
Actually I can't even get the USB floppy to mount. Android Storage Settings says "Checking" and the floppy spins, then the phone always crashes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hello Sir Fractic, I use a Galaxy S8+ With Samsung Dex. I do not format the disks there but can read them. Let me check when I get home and try with a direct USB connection.
Interesting. So the Floppy Drive was connected to Windows, and you used DeX to copy files from the phone to the drive? Or some other way? Please kindly clarify when you have time. Thanks.
Hello again. I tried a few things: - I tried formatting a 3"5 floppy with MS-DOS hoping it would write an MBR that the C64 would read. Nope. - I tried formatting in Android. Settings->Device Care-> Storage. Top menu Storage Settings->Choose TEAC drive. You should see Format or it will ask you to format. Good news the format produced works on the C64. Bad news, it only formats to 352K. I gotta work on that. What works for me now: Format on Mac with MBR : Use android to add, remove files. I will let you know when I figure out how to fully format the floppy. Best...
Seems like maybe one could write a custom format tool which generates a floppy-sized FAT16 partition and then overlap the MBR with the boot sector (since these headers use different parts of the sector), and then (maybe) get a disk image which works in both cases. But, not sure, not tested this idea yet (nor sure how the C64 mini would respond to the partition LBA being 0; I don't have one...).
The other problem you'd have with the USB adapters for 5.25" is that they are not USB Mass Storage adapters. So even if you got the format right (FAT), they still wouldn't work. They only work with special software back on the host for making archive images of the disk. No Mass Storage.
I worked with it today. I noticed that you always need to have 171 kb of free space available for the "THEC64-drive8.d64"-image, if it doesn't exist yet. Otherwise, it will create this file once you insert it. When there's not enough space available, it will make the disk unreadable and you'll have to format it again. Also, each save state uses 50-51 kb space. As there are 4 save states for each disk image, each disk image can potentially be - 171 kb (d64-image) - 4 x 51 = 204 kb (save state) = 375 kb in total This means that you can have the default image with 2 save states + 3 other images, including 4 save states per disk image, on a single floppy drive.
I wonder if its possible to construct a fat 12 formatted floppy in the format windows expects and add in a partition table. A quick look at the specification suggests that it might be possible. Basically combining a floppy disk sector 0 and mbr sector 0 into one and have the partition table entry point to the whole disk
My mom worked at a middle school with a lady from South Africa. Apparently it took most of a year for her to stop calling them stiffies. Good luck getting a room full of 13 year old to calm down after their teacher asks, "does anyone have a stiffy?" :D
I figured that the 1581 wasn't popular because the majority of C64 software came on 5 1/4" disks. Hard to load you software if your disk won't fit in the drive. :D
The memory is a bit fuzzy, as I was just a kid, but I once bought a rubbish bag full of used Amiga disks, some of which were AGA high density, so wouldn't read on my 500... But I stumbled across a piece of software that would do something to the disk and allow me to read the files on it... No idea what the software was though...
Is it weird that I got excited that Linux got some air time on one of your videos? I (somewhat) recently stumbled upon a stack of 3.5" floppies so I got a USB drive for my openSUSE Linux machine and it took a bit to really understand what I was doing, oddly enough. The actual issue I was having was that the floppies themselves were actually failing, not a software issue. If only there was a 5.25" Floppy to USB drive...
A quick search found a USB-plugged floppy controller board called FC5025 designed for 5.25" drives. There's also the KryoFlux, but as far as I know that only reads, doesn't write.
Did you preorder the vic20 model yet? I’m not sure why amazon U.K. let me preorder it and not the c64 model. Oh well I’m just happy I can get a full size unit.
You need to try next a Gotek USB drive... :) VICE Mode coming to PCUAE, you be able to load VICE from boot up, turning on the machine(THEC64 Mini/Maxi/THEVIC20), its abit like Boot Mode/Classic Mode but better.. :) so you can boot up say C128 from starting up the machine, it includes 7 emulators you can set, PET, C64, VIC20, C128, Plus4, VIC20 on THEC64 Mini... :)
After doing some checking not even FreeDOS will put an MBR on a nonfixed-disk (floppy drive). I think there's a workaround but it's involved and frankly not much benefit for so many actions. The workaround: 1. create a hard drive image in VirtualBox under your FreeDOS vm (minimum size is 4MB) 2. fdisk and format this new disk as normal 3. fdisk /mbr drive_number 4. reboot the VM with a copy of gparted 5. resize the filesystem with gparted to 1.44MB 6. shutdown the vm 7. copy the file for this drive somewhere 8. vboxmanage modifyhd copy.vdi --resize 1.44 9. vboxmanage clonehd copy.vdi copy.img -format raw Step 8 may fail since VirtualBox doesn't want to create hard drives smaller than 4MB so vboxmanage may not work, supposedly qemu-img has a resize option and can convert hard drive image formats. Seriously though apparently this is easier than getting the devs of mkfs.fat to add a mbr option for created images.
"... load save states of games. But I do consider this cheating. And I just can't condone cheating, in that way." If that pause right before 'in that way' were a fraction of a second longer Lady-fractic would have slapped you sooo hard.
Did you try Windows' utility Diskpart? Open a command line as an Administrator, and run "diskpart" at the prompt. It's a little bit stick-shifty but it could work for people that aren't comfortable with Linux.
@@RetroRecipes I only bring it up because it forces you to separately partition and format the disk. Of course, it's complicated by the fact USB floppies aren't the same as the yesteryear floppies... the controllers are hard-wired for read/write, not sector access.
dd is not a disk utility per se; it’s a generic block copier... it doesn’t care what device it’s copying from or to. You could just as well copy from a serial port to a disc drive....
What allows the new method to be read in File Explorer, while the old one couldn't? Guess: the blank disk image formats the drive as FAT32 without an MBR, so Windows can read it. Also, can Macs read a disk formatted using the Windows method? It would probably be good to have a disk that can load files from any computer.
That's pretty slick, as usual! I'm thinking that, since I've never had a Commodore 64, perhaps the way to go now is one of those full-sized C64s as it will run right out of the box but still employ some of the "retro" features ;)
@@RetroRecipes I went and looked around. I think I'm just going to wait for the 64 to be released over here, hopefully sooner than later! Man, back in the early 2000s when I ran a computing center for a college (before the retro scene was hot), I actually had a Commodore 64 I found in a trash pile, along with a TI 99/4, that I had hanging up on the wall on display. I have no idea if either of them worked, and I have no idea where they are. I have moved several times since then.
I found Save Game State did not work for me to my floppy disk drive. It would show that nothing had happened, however, in some cases it actually corrupted the game file itself. So launching the game would end up freezing the C64 requiring a hard reset.
Dear Sir, great video! Actually i'd think may me way more cooler if some cassette player with usb interface (today there are even walkmans woth that) might be attached to the c64s to load software from cassette! Anyone would care to experiment?
Puppyfractic is absolutely adorable. How nice of her to allow you to be on her show.
I know!!
I love that you put work, blood, sweat & dog tears into even videos on topics as nerdy and obscure as this. Also that 64 & disk drive look so tiny in your hands, that dog must be gigantic. :)
ℹ️ Thanks for watching! Since this video was made I now have an even simpler method for Windows, not requiring Linux! 🎉 See the 6 steps here: www.perifractic.com/takeout-shop/1541-mini/. I've also seen a few comments suggesting Windows 10 Subsystem for Linux - sadly it doesn't support accessing block device files. Good luck and may the floppy (or stiffy) be with you!....
Yeah, I don't think it would work.
Trying Ubuntu in a virtual machine is a great way to start. After a while one can install it to the hard disk alongside Windows and chose either at boot up.
@Critter Hunter I just saw your other comment. That really means a lot to me. Thank you, and I'm glad the video (and the mystical music) is hitting the right note in today's world.
try this with rufus.ie/ .... it can do dd
I love it how you combine modern solutions and hardware with the old school stuff!
Ladyfractic’s reaction to “stiffy” made me genuinely laugh out loud.
At least she didn't say "I can understand why..."
I lived in South Africa when I was a kid, and the first time I had a computer lesson I got the giggles when the teacher said he'd be passing a stiffy round the class.
Lol, the kids cheering increasingly higher pitch was hilarious. Good job figuring that out. I'm afraid I'm just not clever enough to figure stuff like that out.
Please say hello to your family 🙂
Including all your furry babies.
Cheers, Retro recipes.
Glad you enjoyed it! Will do!
I want to say................. You guys have the BEST C64 TH-cam channel!!!
Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot 👍🕹️
At 8:13 you almost selected Bop 'n' Rumble! Love that silly very non P.C. game, would probably raise a few eyebrows these days... great video as always!
Great timing! I was just researching whether it would be possible to use an Arduino or RPi as a "passthrough" device to make my C64 mini think the floppy drive was just a very slow, low-capacity flash drive. I'm glad to hear that there's now a workaround for those of us who don't have a Mac!
Yes in South Africa it's called a Stiffy ... this actually got my friend in BIG trouble in the UK in 1996 when he worked there as a software engineer. He needed some 3.5 floppies (We called it a stiffy cause it is a stiff - "hard" NOT a floppy, any more...make sense? doesn't it) so he asked a beautiful "PA girl" to please give him a stiffy, he really needs one as he did not have one for months....then he said maybe she must give him three cause he don't want to bother her too much. well his response was a sexual harassment charge ... now that was explained with difficulty !!!
At least he didn't try to buy them from her! XD
the actual disk inside IS still floppy, though
@@sarreqteryx The thing that you actually handle isn't though.
Woosp lol
And it was only 3.5 inches , she’d have been disappointed anyway 😂
Very cool project! I'm so happy that my one-liner from the C64/128 group made the cut! :D
Haha thanks for letting me borrow it!
@@RetroRecipes my pleasure!
*LOVED THIS PROJECT!*
Thank you for doing a follow up. Just wished there wasn't that extra step, but at least there's a solution out there for Win10 machines.
Perfect episode length THX...
Puppy fractic is so adorable and clearly and cared for a lot 🙂
The video is really interesting
this is incredible. I hope the team responsible for the thec64 firmware are paying attention. :)
Another welcome break from reality into the fuzzy world of Perifractic 🎶😎🐺🙏
Now all you need to do is emulate the "blistering" speed of a 1541 drive to really go retro.
They probably don't call a hard drive anything. They just enjoy its vibrations.
We found 2 floppy disks and one USB floppy drive in my grandpa’s computer room at his house. And all of them still work!
Haha Puppyfractic and her whistle once again is the bright spot of my day, and i have to say your jokes are getting better as well . Great video as alway guys keep up the great work and with the added bonus of some Rob Hubbard music. Catch you on the next one stay safe :-)
Haha thanks!
Nice work, Peri!
Thank you! Cheers!
6:29 and I’m 14 again. Outstanding tune.
Lots of great fun stuff in this one.
This whole series is super fun! :)
Ahhh... the memories of handling floppies... using 'HD-COPY' to formatt up to 1.72 MB, and ultimately '2M' which allowed to format up to 1.92 MB!!!
This was an especially fun episode for me. Thanks.
Thanks so much for the stiffy mention at 6:35 - I think we might be the only nation to call 3.5" that because, well, they are not floppy ?!
I want to buy the dog some ear muffs to stop her hearing all those dad jokes.
The dog could become a poet of the english language with a bit of training!
I just want the gorgeous dog!
I'm thinking I might adapt the design to use a regular-size (4" x 1" high) 3.5" floppy drive: there are USB adapter boards available on ebay that can be used to convert a 3.5" floppy drive for USB operation, and the taller drive would fit the look of the 1541 a little better I think.
(Though on second though - trying to get it properly proportioned around a taller drive might make the model even larger.. Dunno, might be worth a try.)
I’m digging my C64 out right now and playing Sanxion and Uridium !!
On tape of course 😝
I installed the mac os on vmware workstation 15 using windows 10 then used a usb floppy mounted on Mac to format the disk and it worked great I copy some .d64 images to the floppy and it worked fine on the c64 mini and C64 max
Awwww! Someone's being a very affectionate pup today!
I'd kind of forgotten we used to call those discs, "stiffies." I got confused when they became common for PCs (Amiga users were generally using them long before they were the default format) and people called them floppies. I think the logic was the physical form of the unit rather than making the distinction between the actual disc inside vs. a hard disc.
I absolutely know what you mean about the 1581 not being as nostalgic as the 1541... It was a pretty awesome drive though. 800K on a floppy disk felt like a ton of space for a C128. I wish the platform could have just used the 1581, honestly - but of course, so much of the C128 was all about that C64 compatibility, so we had to have those 5.25" disks...
All unix/linux folks know that 'dd' is your friend!
And for retro computing, we make filesystems FAT. Just not very fat.
Glad to see Linux usage but hearing that he made dd work on windows and not on Linux made me grin big, oh well maybe next time, do not give up, it's worth it)
I know nothing about the c64 or vic20 or Amiga...but I like watching your videos.
I appreciate that!
Thanks for this 👍 hugely useful. Used your image and dd on Linux to get my floppies working.
Nice!
Puppyfractic is such a sweetie, and has good comedy timing. She makes the perfect Abbott to your Costello. (Or for the younger gaming viewer, the perfect Tails to your Sonic.)
She's constantly upstaging me!
Even your dog Noped at the end before credits 😂
@Retro Recipes think another update due on this. Read our previous notes. I`ve added an amazing update. thanks
Awesome video man! Love your work :-)
Glad you enjoy it!
It would be awesome if you could buy these 1541 mini drives ready assembled/painted.
I just reminded me that back in the day if I setup a windows computer and put my initials in as my user name the computer would boot up for the first time with a user name "System". My initials are MBR.
Ladyfractic gets to be in the video thumb even though she was only in the video for 15 seconds. Puppyfractic deserved that spot.
But I don't want to be sleeping in her doghouse
Great video ..again! You could make the phone book sound interesting 🤣! 🏴🏴
Maybe one day!
These 1541 mini episodes were pretty awesome. Thanks for making the files free on Thingiverse too!
I was going to suggest, for your next project, to find an internal 5 1/4 inch disk drive and put it in an actual (broken) 1541 drive and do the same thing.
But i realised that would be a cabling issue, since 5 1/4 inch usb drives don't really exist. But if you could get it to work in Windows/Mac, would formatting also be an issue? Cheers!
There is an adapter for that but currently it only supports read not write, so that's a no go for now...
@@RetroRecipes Yeah i saw that too, after I wrote my initial comment. (Here: www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html ) Oh well. Maybe one day Retro Games will release one so we can use our original disks!
I play all vinyl records in my CD player; it works trust me ,it takes a little finagling but once it in your good to go.
It helps to trim them a bit.
No joke, but there is a CD carousel that can also play records. Technology Connections did a whole episode on it.
I think the problem is down to the IBM PC hfloppy drive controller, they were hard coded to only work with MS-DOS formatted disks, so that'ss all Windows will do. Other computers like the Amiga had tools like CrossDos which allowed the Amiga to read and write (and even format) disks to formats intended for other computers.
PCs required a special floppy disk controller (I think it was called the Catweasel) to use floppies from other computers.
I do not have a Mac. I used a friend's Mac to format several diskettes. I use a USB connector on an Android phone to copy and move files. It works great and you do not need Linux. Thanks for the idea to do this.
Hi Christophe, I cannot get formatting to work on the Samsung S10. Did you use any special software to format the disks using Android? Or did you just use Android for file copying only? Thanks.
Actually I can't even get the USB floppy to mount. Android Storage Settings says "Checking" and the floppy spins, then the phone always crashes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hello Sir Fractic, I use a Galaxy S8+ With Samsung Dex. I do not format the disks there but can read them. Let me check when I get home and try with a direct USB connection.
Interesting. So the Floppy Drive was connected to Windows, and you used DeX to copy files from the phone to the drive? Or some other way? Please kindly clarify when you have time. Thanks.
Hello again. I tried a few things:
- I tried formatting a 3"5 floppy with MS-DOS hoping it would write an MBR that the C64 would read. Nope.
- I tried formatting in Android. Settings->Device Care-> Storage. Top menu Storage Settings->Choose TEAC drive. You should see Format or it will ask you to format.
Good news the format produced works on the C64. Bad news, it only formats to 352K. I gotta work on that.
What works for me now: Format on Mac with MBR : Use android to add, remove files.
I will let you know when I figure out how to fully format the floppy.
Best...
Another great video, funny, interesting and well edited! And oh man, is Puppifractic cute... :-D
Thank you! 😀
3:23 "He lubs me!" in Polish "On lubi mnie" :D
Seems like maybe one could write a custom format tool which generates a floppy-sized FAT16 partition and then overlap the MBR with the boot sector (since these headers use different parts of the sector), and then (maybe) get a disk image which works in both cases.
But, not sure, not tested this idea yet (nor sure how the C64 mini would respond to the partition LBA being 0; I don't have one...).
Puppyfractic, USB flash drives aren't for licking! 😹🤣 1:16
Hi guys. Lady Factric and Mr Factric. It is only the 3.5" disk which we South African's call a stiffy. And yes a hard disk is still a hard disk. :]
The other problem you'd have with the USB adapters for 5.25" is that they are not USB Mass Storage adapters. So even if you got the format right (FAT), they still wouldn't work. They only work with special software back on the host for making archive images of the disk. No Mass Storage.
...uh...i'm late, again...but that doesn't make this episode less enjoyable 😘
Man i love dat dog she is the only reason i suscribe to your channel she is so awesome amazing and smart
Um thanks lol!
I worked with it today. I noticed that you always need to have 171 kb of free space available for the "THEC64-drive8.d64"-image, if it doesn't exist yet. Otherwise, it will create this file once you insert it. When there's not enough space available, it will make the disk unreadable and you'll have to format it again.
Also, each save state uses 50-51 kb space. As there are 4 save states for each disk image, each disk image can potentially be
- 171 kb (d64-image)
- 4 x 51 = 204 kb (save state)
= 375 kb in total
This means that you can have the default image with 2 save states + 3 other images, including 4 save states per disk image, on a single floppy drive.
Good points!
0?CHR$(205.5+RND(.));:GOTO made the cut! It's like we did stealth cross-over episodes today. :) Cheers!
Haha what a funny turn of events! Thanks for all your help! 👍🕹
Ha, I stumbled on both episodes today. Cool application of the German Tank problem.
Great video.. I am thinking to build a Mini 64 set up, this will come in handy..
I wonder if its possible to construct a fat 12 formatted floppy in the format windows expects and add in a partition table. A quick look at the specification suggests that it might be possible. Basically combining a floppy disk sector 0 and mbr sector 0 into one and have the partition table entry point to the whole disk
My mom worked at a middle school with a lady from South Africa. Apparently it took most of a year for her to stop calling them stiffies. Good luck getting a room full of 13 year old to calm down after their teacher asks, "does anyone have a stiffy?" :D
I figured that the 1581 wasn't popular because the majority of C64 software came on 5 1/4" disks. Hard to load you software if your disk won't fit in the drive. :D
Watched outtakes, and notified PETA! ;-)
@retro recipes did you try using a third party windows formatting tool such as Rufus? It should allow you to add a MBR to your usb floppy.
Here in Finland, we call floppies "Korppu" = "Rusk"
Also, the big one’s “Lerppu” which literally means floppy
How about modifying a USB stick to look like a really tiny 1541?
The memory is a bit fuzzy, as I was just a kid, but I once bought a rubbish bag full of used Amiga disks, some of which were AGA high density, so wouldn't read on my 500... But I stumbled across a piece of software that would do something to the disk and allow me to read the files on it... No idea what the software was though...
She can see inside my soul? “Oh my dog, it’s full of bits!”... 👩🚀
I use my Amiga 1200 with crossdos to format 720kb Ms-DOS floppy disks. Works fine to read them in Windows :)
I really love this Channel
Is it weird that I got excited that Linux got some air time on one of your videos? I (somewhat) recently stumbled upon a stack of 3.5" floppies so I got a USB drive for my openSUSE Linux machine and it took a bit to really understand what I was doing, oddly enough. The actual issue I was having was that the floppies themselves were actually failing, not a software issue.
If only there was a 5.25" Floppy to USB drive...
A quick search found a USB-plugged floppy controller board called FC5025 designed for 5.25" drives. There's also the KryoFlux, but as far as I know that only reads, doesn't write.
@@maighstir3003 that was what I found too. Read but not write.
Don't stick your floppy, stick your stiffy!
Thanks for the video man, fun to watch even though I have no interest in the machine.
Thanks for watching!
You should make a 3.5" floppy drive case also for a USB floppy drive. It can look like the Commodore 1581. You should sell it on your store.
Now we know the truth, he beats the dog into submission! ;) I used to own a 1581 with my C64. I ran a BBS on it for many years.
9:56 be careful to remove that little springing the top of the naked 3.5”, else it may destroy that USB floppy drive. Stiffy lol
Did you preorder the vic20 model yet? I’m not sure why amazon U.K. let me preorder it and not the c64 model. Oh well I’m just happy I can get a full size unit.
My Favourite retro streamer!
love your dog!!!!
And she loves you!
You need to try next a Gotek USB drive... :) VICE Mode coming to PCUAE, you be able to load VICE from boot up, turning on the machine(THEC64 Mini/Maxi/THEVIC20), its abit like Boot Mode/Classic Mode but better.. :) so you can boot up say C128 from starting up the machine, it includes 7 emulators you can set, PET, C64, VIC20, C128, Plus4, VIC20 on THEC64 Mini... :)
Interesting. How will VICE boot on a PC? Is it running like MS-DOS instead of Windows?
Just found my old C64 with disk drive and printer stored away in the attic. Not sure what happened to the monitor?
You could run a virtual machine of Mac on a PC or run old version of windows in a virtual machine possibly?
After doing some checking not even FreeDOS will put an MBR on a nonfixed-disk (floppy drive). I think there's a workaround but it's involved and frankly not much benefit for so many actions.
The workaround:
1. create a hard drive image in VirtualBox under your FreeDOS vm (minimum size is 4MB)
2. fdisk and format this new disk as normal
3. fdisk /mbr drive_number
4. reboot the VM with a copy of gparted
5. resize the filesystem with gparted to 1.44MB
6. shutdown the vm
7. copy the file for this drive somewhere
8. vboxmanage modifyhd copy.vdi --resize 1.44
9. vboxmanage clonehd copy.vdi copy.img -format raw
Step 8 may fail since VirtualBox doesn't want to create hard drives smaller than 4MB so vboxmanage may not work, supposedly qemu-img has a resize option and can convert hard drive image formats.
Seriously though apparently this is easier than getting the devs of mkfs.fat to add a mbr option for created images.
"... load save states of games. But I do consider this cheating. And I just can't condone cheating, in that way."
If that pause right before 'in that way' were a fraction of a second longer Lady-fractic would have slapped you sooo hard.
How do you even come up with captions like "I wonder if cheese is a liquid"? 🤣
Do you think he's referencing the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch?
th-cam.com/video/Hz1JWzyvv8A/w-d-xo.html
Very good! Now all you need to do is train puppy Fractic to load a game on the C64. You can do it!!!
OMG! This is so damn great! Keep it goin!
Cheers. Love your videos. Don’t forget to show some love to the Atari computers. I started college with mine.
Thanks! VCS repair & refurb coming soon...
Can't believe I'm still subscribed after he drilled a hole in a C64
That hole was already there. Ray Carlsen dunnit.
Great stuff 👍
Did you try Windows' utility Diskpart? Open a command line as an Administrator, and run "diskpart" at the prompt. It's a little bit stick-shifty but it could work for people that aren't comfortable with Linux.
I think I tried that yes
@@RetroRecipes I only bring it up because it forces you to separately partition and format the disk.
Of course, it's complicated by the fact USB floppies aren't the same as the yesteryear floppies... the controllers are hard-wired for read/write, not sector access.
Great vid... And now, for some reason, I feel I need to look up some Matt Chat videos...
youtube why am I just now seeing this today when it was posted yesterday? I checked many times. lol
What about that 1.44 floppy on a Pi1541 on a real breadbin?
I do not use d64 containers on my floppies, i do use blank d81 containers created in vice
so next logic step: 5.25 USB floppy for TheC64Maxi. Would it work same way? Would it need 12V, so no chance for USB?
dd is not a disk utility per se; it’s a generic block copier... it doesn’t care what device it’s copying from or to. You could just as well copy from a serial port to a disc drive....
What allows the new method to be read in File Explorer, while the old one couldn't?
Guess: the blank disk image formats the drive as FAT32 without an MBR, so Windows can read it.
Also, can Macs read a disk formatted using the Windows method? It would probably be good to have a disk that can load files from any computer.
That's pretty slick, as usual! I'm thinking that, since I've never had a Commodore 64, perhaps the way to go now is one of those full-sized C64s as it will run right out of the box but still employ some of the "retro" features ;)
I think it's a great option
@@RetroRecipes Hopefully, it will be released in the US soon. I guess I could always get a UK release if I had to.
@@BollingHolt You can pre-order the VIC-20 (same firmware and runs C64) from Amazon UK for USA delivery as I understand it 👍🕹
@@RetroRecipes I went and looked around. I think I'm just going to wait for the 64 to be released over here, hopefully sooner than later! Man, back in the early 2000s when I ran a computing center for a college (before the retro scene was hot), I actually had a Commodore 64 I found in a trash pile, along with a TI 99/4, that I had hanging up on the wall on display. I have no idea if either of them worked, and I have no idea where they are. I have moved several times since then.
@@BollingHolt hey man, if your still looking you can get one off of amazon uk.
Better file systems support is one of the reasons I use Linux as my main OS.
I found Save Game State did not work for me to my floppy disk drive. It would show that nothing had happened, however, in some cases it actually corrupted the game file itself. So launching the game would end up freezing the C64 requiring a hard reset.
Dear Sir,
great video! Actually i'd think may me way more cooler if some cassette player with usb interface (today there are even walkmans woth that) might be attached to the c64s to load software from cassette! Anyone would care to experiment?
Thanks. Sadly not possible. See other comments. THEC64 can't read audio files.
A firmware upgrade might do? If ever should be possible to use a smartphone to load games via audio?