Preserving my C-64
Monday, May 26th, 2008The basement looks like a graveyard for computer hardware, all victims of the PC plague. Sinclair. Coleco. Commodore. Amiga. They all still work, but their owner, sadly, pays them little attention, except for an occasional nostalgic power up. It’s time they found better homes. But first, history must be preserved.
I bought a XE/XM-1541 adapter on E-Bay that was originally made by VintageComputerCables.com. One end plugs into a Commodore 1541 floppy drive, the other end into the PC parallel port. Using Star Commander in DOS or OpenCBM on Linux, it’s possible to transfer a disk image (a D64 file). It also works with a 1581 drive and 3.5 floppies (a D81 file). I made disk images of all my programs. Remarkably, everything was still readable. I tried to copy some old commercial games, but the copy protection on the disks prevented it. It made sense after I thought about it. Anyway, my personal stuff was more important.
They run great under VICE, which is a very complete Commodore emulator. It even emulates the slow load times, or you can turn on warp mode when you’re feeling impatient. A friend pointed me to FC64, a Commodore 64 emulator written in Flash that can already play some programs. That’s crazy.
Even after making disk images to complete my C-64 codeography, I still can’t bring myself to pitch the stacks of old floppies. I feel like one of those people on Style Network’s Clean House who live in clutter because they can’t part with anything that carries a memory. I’ll work myself up to it eventually.