And I thought MY 1541 was heavily modded! Track display, reset, JiffyDOS, Switch Mode power Supply, Device ID switches, RAMBOard, Burst nibbler / Parallel port mod. THIS changes everything! I'll be getting a second 1541 just because you made this, I can't be without it. Simply amazing! My breadbin is a made in England case, Mechboard64 with blue cherry MX's, white keycaps with front print from an early German C=64C, orange function keycaps from a VIC20, A FU-32 dual beam pentode audio pre-amp, OLED audio spectrum analyzer, 4 paddle potentiometers for Cynthcart 64, volume potentiometer, additional separate headphone jack and RCA jacks, in and out stereo to SIDFX w/ MOS 1681 R4-AR and 8580 R5. VICII2, JiffyDOS, red / blue IRQ activity LED, reset button hooked up to 556 dual timer IC, RF Modulator replacement w/ S-Video & Audio. A Ray Carlsen power supply, 1541UII+, TurboChameleon v2, MIDI controller keyboard and Magic Voice Module that's fun to program for. Yes - it's a Frankenstein's monster with stuff sticking out of it everywhere but it's precisely what I wanted. Video needed to be both NTSC and PAL so I bought a used 14" Sony PVM that had S-Video and a then a misdelivered display port HP 4:3 aspect ratio medical document viewing monitor showed up at my doorstep and nobody would take it back - so I got convertin' from S-Video to HDMI to Display Port = gorgeous picture!
Amazing work! My drives are all 1541-II's so now I'm going to be hunting for a 1541 before your trackers go on sale. :) Looking forward to seeing the innards and definitely would love to see some of your development videos.
Awesome project! I look forward to seeing pdate/install videos. A development retrospecttive would be cool as well. The indus GT was a cool drive, they had an Atari verson as well and I saw it in action on a buddies original Atari 800. I was lucky enough to have a 1541, an Indus was not in my budget back then.
Thanks for your comment. I actually now do own an Indus GT drive. I might have to do a side by side demo just for fun, since that drive gave me some inspiration to build what I did.
@@8BitResurgence I don't have a 1541, I use a pi1541 with my Breadbin and C64C. Although it is great to have everything on a 2GB SD-Card, I really do miss the sounds of a 1541. This project might be the reason to convince myself to buy a real 1541, at least as a 2nd drive. Is it going to be an open source project?
I’ve never seen the point of tracker 1541 mods, and I barely use my 1541s since getting the Ultimate, but this thing has brought out my inner Techmoan and I just might have to get one.
This is very interesting. I have a pair of 1541s I have been meaning to dig into that were modified back in the day with a tracker and, I believe, some kind of copy system. They are a bit of a ribbon cable rats nest.
Awesome work Thomas! Since it knows what track it is on, another nice feature would be to have it intercept the head step signal and not step if it is at the extremities. This would stop the head banging.
@@Okurka. No it wouldn't. You are simply gating off the step signals from the VIA. When on track zero the ROM code will be none the wiser and continue to step the head but the head will remain on track zero without banging.
Yes, the MasterTracker does work with the Phantom. The only caveat is that the Phantom drive board doesn't allow the disk drive to be any device other than 8 or 9. That being the case, the ID selector will only allow you to change between 8 and 9. When the MasterTracker toggles to 10, the phantom interprets that as 8, and 11 the phantom interprets as 9. Otherwise there are no other compatibility issues. AND, it's AMAZING to see the numbers fly when loading, and the rolling effect on formatting with the Phantom! That will be in an upcoming video.
I do have a video planned where I am going to show the MasterTracker functioning with a Phantom, and various other parallel speeders like Professional DOS and DolphinDOS. I like that idea of showing it functioning against various protection schemes too. I'll add that to the list of things to do in that upcoming video. Thanks for the suggestion.
It's been tested on the medium length 1541 logic board model. I have not yet tested it on the 1541c. It physically won't fit in the very original "long" board versions where the 1541 logic board is physically as long as the case. I will update in future videos in terms of other drive compatibility.
I hope you can disable the beeping, that would drive me insane. For a revision, add index sensors for both sides of the disk. I was reminded of The Shadow vaporware , interesting to see something like that actually in a working state.
@19:00 Only the BAM (18:0) and the first sector of a directory (18:1) are guaranteed to be on Track 18. Changing the T&S link on 18:1 to any another track will defeat the "list directory and sync" method.
Even though the directory could be forced to stray off track 18, all you have to do to avoid that is to use a normally formatted diskette in the drive first, locate track 18 and sync it. Then it doesn't matter what you put in. And honestly, what you're talking about here is a pretty oddball situation that is easily avoidable. Thanks for your comment though.
I don't plan on releasing the gerbers, but the unit itself will be available in my shop eventually, once I have the production boards in hand and have a few units pre-built and tested.
Sector display is pointless in real time, as it flies by too fast to view. Plus, it's stored in drive ram which is notoriously unreliable when custom dos/speeder routines are used in many copy protection schemes. The ram in those situations simply isn't updated. I viewed that as a pointless option. All of the copy protection analysis has already been done. This tracker is the most accurate and bulletproof tracker for the 1541. Ramreaders are inferior and unreliable devices, which elevates this far above what you suggest. Thanks for your comment none-the-less.
@8BitResurgence First off, kudos on the beautiful addon. That being said... (And this is just off the top of my head) You can either film the sector display and play it back in slow speed, store it in ram, flash rom, eeprom, send it to your computer, list goes on. So no, it's not pointless. Why read it from RAM when you can pick the data straight off the chip? All the copy protection may have been broken but not fully analysed. It's been broken by kids back in the 80's, hell I was one of them. There are little to no writeups available, and if you asked one of those kids now about, say V-MAX!, they would say "v what? What the hell are you talking about?!" (I aim to change this by having a site with a full analysis of every protection scheme I can get my hands on. I just finished PirateSlayer and am currently working on a writeup) I applaud your design, but 6 boards and God knows how much wiring? The same can be done with an Arduino Nano with an adapter board and an OLED. (See github.com/oe7twj/TrackDuino for an example). Again, I love what you've done, and I will buy one if you decide to sell them 🙂
@@8BitResurgenceplease put me on the top of the stack for buyers, I'm interested in buying 2. Thank you for creating such a beautiful device. If you need help with torture testing please let me know. I live in Australia, if anything can survive the heat here and lack of ozone layer all kinds of electronics die unless they were made for Australian conditions. I also have a FLIR thermal camera, and a Fluke dual-channel scope to do further diagnostics.✌️🇦🇺😎🇺🇸
