as a fan, user and developer of commodore 8bit computers, I can for surely say the 1581 was one of the best add-ons I've ever purchased. I like to use CRT and flopppy drives. I have SD2IEC and IDE64 too but 1581+JiffyDos is simply the best authentic experience you can have. It is very satisfying. Very good speed. You should also get a ZoomFloppy too. It's a perfect add-on. Definitely recommended.
Thanks. It's a device for connecting a Commodore disk drive to a PC or Mac to copy files from or to archive disks. I have a variant of this called XUM1541. I will show that in the next episode (I think)
@@miked4377 The awesome thing about ZoomFloppy is that you can use it to both read and write floppy images on both Commodore IEEE-488 and IEC floppy drives. Even cooler is that if you have parallel modded your IEC floppy drive, it can use parallel connection too to work in very fast speed. If you like to use any real floppy drive with your 8bit Commodore device, it is a definite buy. Very cool device.
@@Arcticretro I even went the middle way in terms of retro. I didn't want to copy all disks onto an xD Card to still have the DJ feeling. So I bought an FNX1591 (now they even have a FNX1592). In the beginning of your video you say that money was an issue to build your own. I say building is fun but I also think sourcing all the material almost comes to a similar price. Don't take me wrong, nothing beats soldering your own. I sure will watch the upcoming parts and of course I'm also interested on the future of your C128. And yes, please show us your version of the XUM1541, I still have a very basic x1541 which goes to my retro PC's parallel port. ;)
I don’t know if you are already finished with the project but have a a look at retrobits recent videos. He did a similar project building a 1581 replica using one of the replica PCBs and a floppy drive adapter and he (and a few others) had some issues with the replica PCBs. They even accidentally destroyed some of the 3.5 inch drives due to layout bugs in some of the PCBs and faulty/mislabelled adapter PCBs (12V and 5V were swapped)
I saw that. He actually made me aware of the wrong voltage to the drive issue, and I would probably have made the same mistake if I haven't seen that first :) I can reveal that the drive is finished and working now.
This is a great video. I'd like to see you use it with some games when it was done. One good game that requires too much disk swapping is Pool of Radiance. I always wondered what it'd be like to play it on a 1581.
@@Arcticretro It stands for Single-Board Computer. In other words, no plugin cards required. The first pre-built home computers were mostly SBCs because that made them cheaper to manufacture (and sell) than having multiple circuit boards. Edit to add, those SBCs usually were cassette-only systems with no disk drive support on-board. In general, adding support for disk drives meant adding a new circuit board, which meant that it was no longer a Single-Board Computer. 😀
