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.
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.
You're welcome; I'm glad you found it useful! I have not used the CBMXfer GUI. For my purposes, using NIBTOOLS on the command line is sufficient and straightforward. Floppy disk drives do need their heads cleaned more frequently these days due to the deteriorating magnetic coating, which is why none of mine have the bottom screws put back in. The top covers can simply be lifted off when needed. :) -- JC
Thank you so much for this video. I have finally been able to start archiving my C64 files I have not seen in thirty years including a game I was developing in HS in 1986. Apparently there were way more of us than I had ever imagined working on Ultima style home brews back then. This is amazing!!! I had a blown PLA and bad drive got a replacement Pla and used drive... soo excited I am rambling. THANK YOU!!!!
Great to hear, Casey! The PLA is one of the most frequently failing chips in the old breadbox style C64, but there are excellent cool-running modern replacements like the PLAnkton EV that are highly practical for machines still seeing many hours of use. 😊 -- JC
Thank you so much for this! I don't have a ZoomFloppy but your video was key to my overcoming some command-line discomfort and letting me playing Space Taxi this evening. Cheers!
My pleasure! If the video made your evening better, then it was a success. 👍 FYI, I've seen that there are GUI front-ends for some of the ZoomFloppy utilities, although I haven't personally used them. -- JC
Nice video! I love my ZoomFloppy and is the tool that really got me back into my Commodore 64. Being able to preserve all my floppies from my youth was important to me.
Thank you! I'm familiar with your channel as well; in fact, *your* ZoomFloppy video is one of the ones I watched before I bought mine. Good to see you here. -- JC
Love it! The ZoomFloppy is such an awesome device. I have used it and nibtools to image lots of my disks. I appreciate your thorough coverage especially for Windows 10 users as this has been a bit of an issue for some. I still have an old Lenovo ThinkCenter running XP that I use as an imaging station for ZF and Kryoflux. NIBTools is awesome too and it is so fast that I have made it my default tool for writing back .D64s to floppy disks as it will, IIRC, add back in the missing headers or whatever is missing from the D64 format that is on a real disk. Thanks so much!
Thank you! Windows 10 did seem quite easy, except for the discrepancy with the PATH. My own understanding is that a D64 file doesn't contain GCR data -- only the 170KB of actual data held on the disk, plus any error codes for bad sectors. So, even if you're using NIBTOOLS, writing out a D64 to a physical disk cannot re-create any custom or non-standard GCR upon which copy protection relied, because it wasn't saved in the D64 file in the first place. As for your old ThinkCentre: if it ain't broke, don't fix it! I too still have a couple of uni-purpose machines, although they never go online. -- JC
Great video! This clears up many things. I bought a ZoomFloppy a few years ago and while I did get the drivers and software installed it wasn't very intuitive. I also use the CBMXfer GUI front end for OpenCBM and nibtools which works very well. I made a parallel cable for my original 1541 and nibtools is the way to go when imaging your floppy disks. CBMXfer can automatically create D64 and G64 files after nibtools has done it's thing.
Thank you for the praise, Michael! Perhaps the install is more intuitive now; one of my reasons for making this video is that I noticed the software had been updated in 2021 & 2022. I'm mainly just doing NIBREAD on the command line and haven't experimented with the GUIs yet. In regards to conversions, dragging a NIB/NBZ onto NIBCONV in Windows Explorer spits out a G64, and doing the same with the G64 spits out a D64 (although I stay with G64 for images of physical disks). It's something I discovered while making my older video on "How to use NIB Disk Image Files". -- JC
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.
Is good that you show this again I was out for a while and never finished my installation. Among other things the cbm tool the drivers I did have installed correctly under windows 7. I had the other option hardware ixum bla bla bla what rotten name never sticks the zoom floppy does haha Thanks for this video....
My pleasure! I'm glad you found it useful. The "other option" (XUM1541) is so-named because it's the latest evolution in a whole series of "X" adaptors. The previous X-cables aren't really recommended for use any longer. -- JC
Fyi, following along with my zoomfloppy and 1571 at 20:10 I got an error, "Error loading plugin 'libusb-1.0.dll': The specified module could not be found. (126)Is your X-cable properly configured?" I ended up downloading libusb-1.0.19-rc1-win.7z and put the libusb-1.0.dll in the nibtools directory and it worked.
I've only used my own ZoomFloppy to make images of physical disks, but it looks like the cbmcopy command in OpenCBM is what you'd want to use. There's also a GUI called CBM-Transfer that alleviates having to use the command line. Alternatively, you can use something like DirMaster by Style to get PRGs into and out of D64 files rather than trying to do that directly with the ZoomFloppy. -- JC
Are you using NIBTOOLS with the 1571? NIBREAD should be able to burst nibble a 1541-formatted disk in about 30 seconds using the 1571's serial port, as demonstrated towards the end of the video. I find this speed is fairly consistent, unless there are many read errors on the disk that the drive needs to retry. -- JC
@@vhfgamer Yeah, you're right. I was asking for it. So what? Like so many on RUclips, the style of talking goes up and down in tone like he's driving over a road full of speed humps. It's bad narration. It's not his voice, and I never said it was, I said 'talk like that'. Got it? Or should I, write like this, in little chunks, like how this, guy talks.
@@anthonyhoffmann I guess you've never watched the news on TV then. They go to school to learn how to talk like that, so they're very easy to understand.
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.
Nice tutorial for new users that have little or none prior C64, with diskdrive(s), knowledge. Well done!
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.
You're welcome; I'm glad you found it useful! I have not used the CBMXfer GUI. For my purposes, using NIBTOOLS on the command line is sufficient and straightforward. Floppy disk drives do need their heads cleaned more frequently these days due to the deteriorating magnetic coating, which is why none of mine have the bottom screws put back in. The top covers can simply be lifted off when needed. :) -- JC
Thank you so much for this video. I have finally been able to start archiving my C64 files I have not seen in thirty years including a game I was developing in HS in 1986. Apparently there were way more of us than I had ever imagined working on Ultima style home brews back then. This is amazing!!! I had a blown PLA and bad drive got a replacement Pla and used drive... soo excited I am rambling. THANK YOU!!!!
Great to hear, Casey! The PLA is one of the most frequently failing chips in the old breadbox style C64, but there are excellent cool-running modern replacements like the PLAnkton EV that are highly practical for machines still seeing many hours of use. 😊 -- JC
Thank you for taking the time to do this.
Thank you so much for this! I don't have a ZoomFloppy but your video was key to my overcoming some command-line discomfort and letting me playing Space Taxi this evening. Cheers!
My pleasure! If the video made your evening better, then it was a success. 👍 FYI, I've seen that there are GUI front-ends for some of the ZoomFloppy utilities, although I haven't personally used them. -- JC
Nice video! I love my ZoomFloppy and is the tool that really got me back into my Commodore 64. Being able to preserve all my floppies from my youth was important to me.
Thank you! I'm familiar with your channel as well; in fact, *your* ZoomFloppy video is one of the ones I watched before I bought mine. Good to see you here. -- JC
@@BasicBitesCA Thanks, glad I found it. Keep up the good work!
Love it! The ZoomFloppy is such an awesome device. I have used it and nibtools to image lots of my disks. I appreciate your thorough coverage especially for Windows 10 users as this has been a bit of an issue for some. I still have an old Lenovo ThinkCenter running XP that I use as an imaging station for ZF and Kryoflux.
NIBTools is awesome too and it is so fast that I have made it my default tool for writing back .D64s to floppy disks as it will, IIRC, add back in the missing headers or whatever is missing from the D64 format that is on a real disk. Thanks so much!
Thank you! Windows 10 did seem quite easy, except for the discrepancy with the PATH. My own understanding is that a D64 file doesn't contain GCR data -- only the 170KB of actual data held on the disk, plus any error codes for bad sectors. So, even if you're using NIBTOOLS, writing out a D64 to a physical disk cannot re-create any custom or non-standard GCR upon which copy protection relied, because it wasn't saved in the D64 file in the first place. As for your old ThinkCentre: if it ain't broke, don't fix it! I too still have a couple of uni-purpose machines, although they never go online. -- JC
Great video! This clears up many things. I bought a ZoomFloppy a few years ago and while I did get the drivers and software installed it wasn't very intuitive. I also use the CBMXfer GUI front end for OpenCBM and nibtools which works very well. I made a parallel cable for my original 1541 and nibtools is the way to go when imaging your floppy disks. CBMXfer can automatically create D64 and G64 files after nibtools has done it's thing.
Thank you for the praise, Michael! Perhaps the install is more intuitive now; one of my reasons for making this video is that I noticed the software had been updated in 2021 & 2022. I'm mainly just doing NIBREAD on the command line and haven't experimented with the GUIs yet. In regards to conversions, dragging a NIB/NBZ onto NIBCONV in Windows Explorer spits out a G64, and doing the same with the G64 spits out a D64 (although I stay with G64 for images of physical disks). It's something I discovered while making my older video on "How to use NIB Disk Image Files". -- JC
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.
Awesome vid! I knew all this information.. However it took me days of pulling my hair out doing it!
Thank you for the comment! Hopefully this alleviates others from hair-pulling. ☺ -- JC
you're the best!!!
Is good that you show this again I was out for a while and never finished my installation.
Among other things the cbm tool the drivers I did have installed correctly under windows 7.
I had the other option hardware ixum bla bla bla what rotten name never sticks the zoom floppy does haha
Thanks for this video....
My pleasure! I'm glad you found it useful. The "other option" (XUM1541) is so-named because it's the latest evolution in a whole series of "X" adaptors. The previous X-cables aren't really recommended for use any longer. -- JC
Fyi, following along with my zoomfloppy and 1571 at 20:10 I got an error, "Error loading plugin 'libusb-1.0.dll': The specified module could not be found. (126)Is your X-cable properly configured?" I ended up downloading libusb-1.0.19-rc1-win.7z and put the libusb-1.0.dll in the nibtools directory and it worked.
What the hayhay? I didn’t even know this existed.
How does one copy PRG files through zoom floppy? I followed your directions for d64 and nibbler.
I've only used my own ZoomFloppy to make images of physical disks, but it looks like the cbmcopy command in OpenCBM is what you'd want to use. There's also a GUI called CBM-Transfer that alleviates having to use the command line. Alternatively, you can use something like DirMaster by Style to get PRGs into and out of D64 files rather than trying to do that directly with the ZoomFloppy. -- JC
i fined there all SLOW I use my 1571 and 1581 and it takes for ever to wright disks.. there way faster on my c128
Are you using NIBTOOLS with the 1571? NIBREAD should be able to burst nibble a 1541-formatted disk in about 30 seconds using the 1571's serial port, as demonstrated towards the end of the video. I find this speed is fairly consistent, unless there are many read errors on the disk that the drive needs to retry. -- JC
I lasted 32 seconds. Can you please not talk like that.
If you find my voice so attractive that you only lasted 32 seconds... I hardly see why that's *my* issue. 😉 -- JC
@@BasicBitesCA *sigh*
@@anthonyhoffmann You were asking for that one. Nothing wrong with the dude's voice.
@@vhfgamer Yeah, you're right. I was asking for it. So what?
Like so many on RUclips, the style of talking goes up and down in tone like he's driving over a road full of speed humps. It's bad narration.
It's not his voice, and I never said it was, I said 'talk like that'. Got it?
Or should I,
write like this,
in little chunks,
like how this,
guy talks.
@@anthonyhoffmann I guess you've never watched the news on TV then. They go to school to learn how to talk like that, so they're very easy to understand.