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There are more of these C units out there than you may realise. I have one that has the Newtronics mech, newer style board with the r/w hybrid module and it is actually a brown/beige case with the rainbow logo. So it looks like the regular 1541 from 1982 but is actually a C. I also have a creme 1541 that looks like it should be a C but on the inside it's the same common older board from the brown 1541 but the mech is an Alps version. The mech is just the same 1541 older mech and the faceplate is just painted creme. The other side of the faceplate is brown so it was just painted by Commodore. As we all know, Commodore would just fit anything together using whatever parts they had in stock and sell it so it's not surprising there are drives around with various combinations of the parts, creme 1541 drives with Newtronics or Alps mechs and brown 1541C drives with Newtronics or Alps mechs and either type can have the older board or the newer type with the ceramic hybrid head read/write module. The only way to know for sure is to open it up and look inside.

23:30 Not true. All of the Commodore drives have a fabric belt that does NOT stretch and should never be touched or replaced with a rubber belt. I have many drives and I've never seen one break or wear out. Of course it can happen but so far they appear to be still like new.

Thumbs up for knowing how to say aluminium correctly ;-) Years ago I picked up a MPS1230. Of course the ribbon was dry. I did some research and found that the mechanism was made by Olivetti and I found the exact model Olivetti-made ribbons new-old-stock which worked perfect. Around the same time I dumped the rom and documented the hardware and that printer is currently emulated in MAME and can provide a hard copy of anything which gets saved as a png. It's also nice as it's a dual interface Commodore IEC and parallel for use with Amiga or PC. Prior to that back in the mid 80's I had a MCS810 which is the Commodore rebadge of the Okimate 20. I really disliked that printer because it was incredibly slow and it used a thermal head which died after a few years where most of the time it was just sitting powered off. It also used plastic ribbons with a wax-like 4-colour 'ink' so it's a use-once and throw away ribbon which is also not good now in 2024. The MPS1230 is still working great and I don't see any point in the future where the ribbons will have done enough printing that they will require re-inking but it is at least possible with this model. For the Commodore retro collector the 1230 is a great choice for a Commodore 64 printer. It's pretty amazing that these old 40+ year old printers are still going whereas your average HP/Canon/Epson printer lasts ~3 years then it's game over permanently, plus the cost of ink makes them rediculous to run for all but once-a-year printing. Once a year means really that, after a year the heads have dried up with old ink and you toss it in the bin and buy a new one. Long live Commodore printers! :-)

I went into the rabbithole of finding a display solution for a C64, or even deeper for a C128 and I gave up. C64/C128 output stinks, no matter how hard you try. For using a real machine, connect over RF and accept the mess. A proper colour RF CRT TV is 10€. Enjoy your obnoxious purple on purple BASIC text in an unreadable fonth with massive colour bleed and noise as it is supposed to be. Even with the correct cables on a Trinitron with S-video the image sucks. Heck, even on a venerable 1084 it is far from clean. Only C128 80 column display on that screen is nice, but it has no use without compatible software, so why bother? If you want a clean image, get an emulator with customisation for the palette and enjoy brighter colours.

also I just got a 1571 that powers up and acts like it's working but after initial use the activity light flashes continuously. One tech note I found says the 1772 controller ic has failed. can you comment further?

btw: i got a -05 rom from this guy on ebay shawndbelknap a few weeks ago (7/2024)

thanks for the lead on the molycoat. I'm surprised that while you had the drive out of the case you didn't soak the covers in peroxide.

This is awsome information for the pc compatible user... I only have a raspberry pi running raspian and retropi I thought I could get away with using dosbox however I am presented with "this program cannot be run in DOS mode" It would really be nice if I knew of a solution I could just apt-get install and have what I need

I should also mention that I am sure I am not the only person that misses new episodes of Basic Bites and I hope to see a return as this channel and JC are on the top of the list IMHO.

This is a great reference for 2024 too and I point new ZF users here all the time. 1571 is for sure a great way to use the ZF to the fullest including nibtools. That said if your only drive is a 1541 then it will still work pretty quick with D64copy as even with out a parallel cable it will use "Warp" mode to copy a D64 or a DIsk in pretty decent time. Of course you can't use nibtools without a parallel mod or a 1571 but still better then nothing I guess.

"Lift... up"? Oh, don't "lift it down," eh?

"Use Commodore diskettes." Yeah, right! Even if they blanks of those actually do/did exist, those are probably just rebadged other brands of disks like their monitors are rebadged. I've seen the few out there that already have the OEM stuff on them. But where have I ever seen a box of _blank_ Commodore disks?

I'll bet we can download the manual even if we _do_ have a physical copy of it.

The motor isn't driven by a belt in the 1541s; the motor _drives_ a belt, and is driven by electricity.

"1541 _Mark_ II"? Does it say "mark" anywhere on the name badge, or isn't it just the 1541-II? Do you call Apple IIs "Apple Mark Ii" instead, too?

7:31 time warner sued gaylord to affiliate with cbs

I just discovered your channel and you did an excellent video of ZoomFloppy. Sorry to see you haven't uploaded anything in a year. I hope you're not gone. I'd love to see more of your videos.

pound the pound key. not bad. good vid thanks for sharing.

How do you fix a squeaky noise when the drive is spinning?

Did this capability break in v1.25 firmware? I followed your exact same steps (making sure I am in browser mode) and I do NOT get a new disk image created. At first I thought it may have been JiffyDOS getting in the way since it is not 100% browse mode compatible but I still had the trouble after disabling it. It is as if I did not issue the command. Not even a flash from the drive activity light. Strange. My pi1541 is currently assigned as device 9 which I specified in the command.

I used cotton swabs for a few times but I would find pieces of cotton inside so I started using the soft flatter swabs and for me that worked. Just sayin'.

With a small hardware mod and updated load-routine the C64 can use a 1571 disk drive in fast mode.

First of all know the resolutions: 15"=1024x768, 17&19" is 1280x1024 (and thus not 4:3 but 5:4), and 20/21" is usually either 800x600 or the double resolution: 1600x1200. Of all these, the 1600x1200 panels are by far the best, they are IPS/VA with wide viewing angles, decent contrast en nice CCFL backlights with a rich gamut. You CAN look for monitors, but make sure it is a monitor with composite/S-video. These do exist and are not that hard to find. For example a Samsung 213T. You don't want RF tuning, as the noise/chroma bleed will be really bad looking on a flat panel. And last of all, wide-screen is not that bad: the screens are often WAY better, as cheap and black bars will make sure things are still 4:3. For example a Panasonic Viera can be had for 20 bucks or even free. Over RGB SCART, your consoles will look asthonishing on it.

Thanks for making a more clear path regarding this installation. Those two sets of instructions caused me confusion years ago. Although I was only one version of opencbm behind, following your instructions for the update to ".104" was easier than what I did in the past. I'm surprised you did not discuss the "CBMXfer" GUI for opencbm. I used that primarily to backup some old floppies. Since it also supports nibtools, I took advantage of that for some protected disks. It went well for the most part but I did get interrupted often with disks that had the magnetic layer flaking off, forcing me to clean the heads. Something else I remember about nibtools is that I had trouble using the latest releases. I had to find something older and "Zoom floppy" compatible. Perhaps I need to follow up on that to see if it is still true today.

I bought a 1526 at a warehouse clearance store. All my kid brain knew was that there was a GEOS driver for it. I didn't know about the single programmable character "graphic mode". It took something like 20 minutes to print out a single page of text with geoWrite. But I was happy with the square pixels and plastic ribbon.

Nice discovery! ;-) Some cartridge fastloaders do in fact also support the 1581 (dunno about native 1571), e.g. the Action Replays, Nordic Power, Super Snapshots and all their derivatives... I tried it when I had borrowed a 1581 once when we made Colour Spectrum for C128...

If it is of any interest to anyone, I've been working on a program that makes nibs of V-Max protected disks writable back to disk with no hang-ups or loading issues and without modifying the loader routine. (including Defender of the Crown)

FYI, there is a luma signal on the RGBi connector, so if you make a cable with an rca connector from pin 1 (gnd) and pin 7 (luma), you can just plug it into a composite monitor and have monochrome 80 column display, no rgb monitor necessary!

Sorry for my blasphemia, but I need a 5,25 inch floppy drive for another computer, and these C64 ones seem to be the cheapest. Is it acceptable to trash the controllerboard and hook it up to another computer's NEC D765 controller?

Hello me too also trying to build one using PI3A+ but my issue is I don't have HDMI output. Do you by chance know this issue?

Awesome this helped me figure out what to do with these NIB files! Here is a batch file that will process all files in a folder: @echo convert NIB to G64 for /f "delims=" %%i in ('Dir /b *.nib') Do (nibconv.exe -v "%%~fi" "%%~ni.g64") Just put the nibconv.exe into the same folder as the NIB I thought I could just select all the NIB and drag onto the nibconv.exe but that did not work. So I came up with the above batch file.

What about a text file instead of graphics?

I have one of these i bought non working. I have not tried to fix it.

Back in the day, we saw these things several times when messing with code. We had a laugh, got over it, and then moved on. Nobody made a big deal about it nor really cared. It wasn't until the internet that people started noting in great detail things like Microsoft's CPU DIE message etc.

Do you have a website where I could ask further questions?

"If you've ever used... these are the exact same thing." I bet they are even if we _haven't_ used that command.

"...In order to get the files off the disk." Why would we want to do that? Shouldn't just getting them _from_ the disk but leaving them on it be enough?

"...Using no special equipment really other than the computer itself." So using no special equipment... PERIOD.

I recognize this disk, we did get one along with the Test/Demo disk way back in '82 when I was just 8.

Is there no poke or chr$ for the Restore function?

Oh! You know what connection I just made after 30+ years of knowing about other Commodore 64s than just the normal one? The VIC-20's default color scheme is also the one on the SX-64! OH my GOSH, why did I only just realize that RIGHT NOW even though I had played around with SXes in high school and David Murray the 8-Bit Guy showed us that he built his new studio building based on this scheme and at some point I think he showed us an SX-64, as well as others? Why did it just barely take THIS video for me to connect the dots? So why, do you think, they used the 20's scheme in the SX? Oh my gosh, how interesting! Happy Christmas (2023)!

How did Jim write Supermon, though from my understanding there was nothing like it for the 64 that came before? Or how would anyone have written the first one, for that matter?

Haha, Commodore logo as a "reverse Pac-Man"!

"...If not on actual hardware." Even if we're just doing this on the VICE, we're doing it on some sort of _actual hardware._

"TWENTY-twenty-two" is easier to say. Remember 1776? Yeah, like that. How did you say that? Not like "one thousand..." whatever, right?

29:50 How did you go back to text editor from preview?

No mention of the most important difference that is the infamous Mitsumi head prone to failure compare to the early more reliable Alps

Nice tutorial for new users that have little or none prior C64, with diskdrive(s), knowledge. Well done!

Thanks for this excellent video, it helped me to understand a lot. I still have an issue which I can't figure out, maybe you can help. I try to burn the G64 file on a real floppy. I use XUM1541 or also tried in prompt commad. I have my parallel cable connected from the 1541 to the C64. But, I obviously miss something in the picture.Everytime I try to burn a g64, he keep saying connection failed with the P.C. I use the P.C. to run my professional dos in the 64 but I am now wondering, if the C64 is off while I try to burn the G64 file, what is the key here? Thanks a milion if you read my answer

Hi, I just tried following your suggestions on creating a blank with my pi2541. It creates a d64 all right, but I found that when I enter the emulation mode and create a simple basic code eg. 10 print “hello” I get an error ?syntax error in 0. Can you check and see if you get similar results? Ps: I have found a work around when the error shows after typing run for line 0 just type 0 followed by return and do the same when 665 comes up type 665 followed by return. After these faults have been eliminated the disk image seems to be working as normal.