Commodore 1541 Disk Drive PC mod – Part II

After a trip to Maplins to pick up a few spare parts I started rewiring for the PC power/reset switch, HDD LED and Power LED header connections.

Reusing front panel header cable/pin block from a spare PC I wrote down the the connections and resoldered the original 1541 case LED’s.

Also from Maplins,  I brought a new on/off switch and fitted this where the original on/off switch was located. I was going to use the original switch but after cutting a section out of the case it wouldn’t fit any more

Since removing the original floppy drive unit there isn’t  anything to affix the front panel to so I super-glued it to the lower half of the 1541 case. I’ve used cable ties to secure some of the cables however I didn’t bother with the ATX cables as these would be exchanged for a PICO psu at a later date.

I connected the PSU and flipped the on button and the original green power led lit up. I bet it’s been some years since this was lit!

I ran the PC for a few hours with the the case lid attached and the temperature didn’t really increase any. However, as I intend to use it as a NAS drive and potentially running 24/7 I though fitting a fan might be best after all.

I opted for a silent 80cm Akasa case fan which emits  blue light when spinning and looks really cool when the light shines through the case top vent.

Here’s a close up

..and here’s how everything looks inside so far. The fan sits loose on the top of the board but I’ve since super-glued it to the top half of the 1541 case.

As it is, the PC is quite usable although I still have a list of things to do -

• Swap out the MATX for a Pico PSU/ external laptop mains adapter
• Replace the flat/ugly grey IDE ribbon with a new thinner cable (I have one in my spare box but it’s a double IDE cable therefore way to much cable for my liking.
• Change the 3.5″ for a 2.5″ – I only have a spare 30mb 2.5″ drive so capacity wise, not really big enough to be useful.
• Test to see if the PC will boot from Compact Flash cartridge.
• Possibly fit a spare slimline CD Rom drive. I tested this earlier today and if i remove the CD front bezel, there’s just enough room to eject a CD through the original 1541 front bezel. I just need to figure out where to put the eject button.

Now…what else can I transform into a PC….our mantle clock looks big enough

Commodore 1541 Disk Drive PC mod – Part 1

Following on from my first post http://stiggyblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/commodore-1541-disk-drive-project/ my ITX PC motherboard arrived yesterday therefore I spent this afternoon getting my little project started.

Commodore 64/Vic 1541 Floppy Disk Drive – c1982

Taking a screwdriver to the inside of the 1541 floppy drive I removed the screws attaching the circuit board, drive unit and motor. Just a few screws held the circuit board in place giving easy access to the other components.

I’ve removed all of the cable apart from the power switch,  activity and power LED’s thinking it would be quite nice to use these original parts with the ITX board.

I love these old floppy drive units, all chunky  with cogs and drive belts all over the place. It’s a shame it’s not a working model or I’d be using it with my Commodore 64!

Now that all the components had been removed I was left with an empty shell case. My first thoughts was that there probably wouldn’t be enough room for my MATX PSU unit.

I’ll worry about actual fitting the new PC parts later on but for now, I had 25 years of dirt and grime to clean. As you can see from the picture below, the case was in need of a good scrub. My weapon of choice? – Dettol Mould & Mildrew remover. Although designed to clean Mildew from wall tile grout it does wonders on plastics  with little effort.

Before….

..and after. Almost like new!

Putting the case to one side to dry, I unwrapped the small package containing my new ITX motherboard.

Here’s the basic specs -

VIA EPIA MII Fanless ITX motherboard

VIA 600 mhz C3 /Eden Processor

Lan 10/100

x2 IDE ports

1x DDR266 Dimm Slot

x1 PCI slot

Onboard Lan, VGA, LAN, x 3 Audio jacks, USB 2.0, FireWire, Serial and LPT ports, TV Out, x2 PS/2 ports.

This model also contains an onboard card bus socket which supports PCMCIA wireless cards and a Compact Flash Card slot. I’m not sure if this is just for storage or supports using a CF card as a boot device – hope so!

Although the specifications are quite low it’s more than enough to run as a NAS drive or SFF PC for my 8/16-bit emulators.

With the pen placed on the right, you can see how  small these  ITX motherboards are – 17cm x 17cm.

The usual auxillary ports on offer, note the Cardbus/CF slot above the audio ports.

The board fitted perfectly into the 1541 case leaving just a little room either side. Luckily three of the four original case standoff lined up perfectly with the motherboard so mounting problem solved (thanks for the Velcro tip AndyT -  I’ll be using that on the HDD) You can see here that I’ve fitted a rather chunky 3.5″ hard disk but this is just for testing,  I’ll be replacing this with a 2.5″ laptop drive shortly.

It’s highly likely there won’t be enough room for the power supply so I’ll probably opt for a PICO/External PSU later on.

I’ve raided my PC parts box/spare PC’s  and found an unused stick of Ram (512mb), PC case Power switch/HDD LED from an old Dell, thin IDE cable and a DVD Drive from an old e-Machine.

I just wanted to test the motherboard worked first so everything was fitted together without worrying about cables being a bit messy. With the last cable connected I pressed the magic button and waited.

The PSU Fan fired up and for a fraction of a second I though something was amiss (the board is THAT quiet) until the POST screen was displayed on my monitor. I hit the DEL key and was greeted by the familiar BIOS configuration menu – phew!

Having a dig around the menus, lots of board options to play with!

We have disk activity !

Popping in a Ubuntu boot disk to ensure everything was functions o.k. Linux driver support must be very good for this model, not a single device missing.

Hmm, wasn’t it a 512 mb stick of ram I installed?

I installed Windows XP,  left it running for about 5 hours and as you can see from the BIOS screen again, things are still very cool.

My next job is to work on the case to ensure a proper fit of the components and cut holes in the back for the PC cables. I’ll cover this in Part 2

Retro Reunited Video

I borrowed Cursties mums video camera to take with me to Retro Reunited. Until i get chance to upload the footage (lots from Q&A with Archer Maclean) here’s a youtube link from Retro Gamer Magazine editor Darren Jones

http://www.youtube.com/user/RetroGamerDaz#play/all/uploads-all/2/0T802I9nyXg

Retro Reunited ’09

Take one hotel, fill it with all manner of old computers & consoles, sprinkle with a variety guest speakers and mix in 250 odd like minded retro fans equals one helluva weekend.

Retro Reunited 09 was held at the Cedar Court Hotel at Ainsley Top, Huddersfield which about and hour/half drive for me in Nottingham. I left in plenty of time to make the 11 o’clock kickoff and on arrival bumped into a few folk I met at the RCM events in May and August.

Bright blue skies and a fairly empty hotel, ten mins later, that would all change!

The event is officially opened by Darren Jones, editor of the one and only Retro Gamer Magazine http://www.retrogamer.net/

My first impression was that a lot of organization 0f work has gone into setting up the event and I tip my hat to Sir Clive and all participates to make this a special weekend. There was plenty of machines on offer from the 70′s right up to the present including quite a few below that I’ve not had chance to play/see before.

There was also plenty of 8-bit computers setup for play and being a huge fan, spend most of that first morning in the Commodore area playing with the Vic20, C64, SX65, C116 and of course the Amiga -  (Thanks Woody for letting me have a poke around inside your A1200 Tower).

My favorite Bread bin

Woody’s Amiga 1200 tower fully loaded with WHDload games.

Plenty of arcade machines to play with too!

…and a few oldies !

The line of guest speakers included the legendary Archer Maclean who presented a preview of his up coming new title for the Nintendo Wii as well of talking about his most famous games IK+, Dropzone and Jimmy Whites Whirlwind Snooker…and his Ferrari

More and more people are enjoying and rediscovering their favorite old systems thanks to the wonderful homebrew storage solutions available allowing programs to be run from modern hard drives and flash storage cards. I spotted a C64 with Ultimate 1541 SD card board, a Beeb with a IDE interface and also a Spectrum +2 with an ethernet port!

Plenty of goodies on offer via the trade outlets were you buy old systems, games and a host of Retro gaming paraphernalia. My PC mouse sits atop my new Bubble Bobble mouse mat! Also managed to pick up a few back issues of Retro Gamer magazine I have missing in my collection.

What a fantastic weekend, met some really nice people, got some tips regarding my 1541 ITX project via a chap who had built a SNES PC (including CD drive built into a game cartridge!), played lots of games including a few DC titles I want to track down, took lots of photos and thanks to Guitar Hero, can’t get the Beatles tunes out of my head!

Can’t wait for the next RCM event in Novemember.

I’ve uploaded the 200 odd photos the my Flickr account if anyone is interested to see more – http://www.flickr.com/photos/26527444@N06/

Zipsticks lined up for action.

Ooo, which one first!

Mini ITX motherboard or Laptop motherboard for mini PC?

I’m currently working on, what I can only describe as my ‘Commodore 1541 retro Nas drive’. Basically taking a vintage 1982 non working Commodore 1541 floppy drive and converting it into something a little more useful like a NAS drive.

See my older post – http://stiggyblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/commodore-1541-disk-drive-project/

Originally i’d planned to use one those very small form factor mini ITX motherboards, however i’ve been thinking about that very old (and pretty much underpowered) laptop I have and wondering if i could reuse the motherboard   instead?

If I strip the laptop of all the components I don’t need, for example the laptop keyboard and plug in an external PS/2 keyboard it will still boot? Likewise, if i remove the LCD panel and plug in an external monitor will it still boot? I’m certainly interested to find out/test because it does, then this pretty much useless laptop may have a use after all.

I plan to use Freenas (http://freenas.org) therefore processor, memory requirement are very minimal. I’ll boot Freenas from a CF card and either use a 2.5″ HDD for storage or hopefully one of the 3.5″ drives I have spare. I probably won’t need an optical drive apart from the initial install of Freenas but I’ll use a USB CD drive for that bit.

If it doesn’t work, eBay seem to have lots of low spec ITX boards from as little as £11.99

I’ll post my result when i get the chance to test a little further.

PC Arcade Style Gamepad

A few weeks ago whilst browsing eBay, I found a rather cheap but interesting looking USB Arcade control pad for my PC.  At only £10 (inc shipping from China) I thought it’s worth a go even if it turns out to be a dud. Sporting ten buttons It’s ideal to use on my PC for MAME, various other computer emulators as well as regular PC titles (My favorite EA Sports NHL franchise being one of them).

About a fortnight after I placed my order, it arrived on Friday and had chance to take a look at it this morning. The package arrived in a jiffy bag rather than boxed and my initial thoughts were  it probably wouldn’t have survived the journey especially as the tall joystick sticks out quite a bit. On inspection the joystick did appear to be bent slightly to the the right.

The Gamepad measures 10″ x 5″ giving amble space between joystick and buttons. It’s sits on sucker pads to stop it sliding around the desktop and feels fairly robust despite looking a bit fragile. The joystick feels quite responsive (it reminds me of the classic 80′s Konix Speedking)  and clicks slightly when moved  although it doesn’t feel like micro-switches have been used. Likewise the buttons look like they could withstand a good pounding but I guess time will tell.

Before I addressed the wonky joystick issue I wanted to check that everything was working o.k. so I attached it to my PC via USB port. There’s no driver software supplied but Windows appeared to detect it o.k. as a ten buttoned joypad. Both joystick and buttons responded well apart from button no.4 which wasn’t registering at all.  The top buttons marked ‘Auto’, ‘Turbo’ & ‘Clear’ also weren’t showing in the Gamepad properties.

Time to crack it open and have a good look see – With the rear cover removed, you can see it’s  fairly basic inside.

Note the grey thing on the right? It’s some kind of metal paper weight!

Here’s the printed side of the circuit board showing the joystick and button contacts which look and feel  similar to laptop keyboard contacts

The joystick is spring loaded at the base and I could see that this wasn’t fitted correctly hence the slight tilt on the joystick.

Here’s a close up of the button undersides. It’s  shame micro-switches haven’t been used. Button no.4 wasn’t sitting right but this was easily corrected.

Time to test it out so I reassembled everything, plugged it in again and checked the buttons again. Everything worked o.k. this time so I launched MAME and configured the button mapping. I mapped buttons for start, coin, select, MAME config menu  and used the remaining six buttons for gameplay.

I ran though a series of games test from Shmups like 1942, R-Type and Gradius to platformers like Bubble Bobble & New Zealand Story and then on to button mashers like Final Fight and Kung-Fu Master. I’d have so say it performed perfectly -  almost like using a real arcade control panel.

Revisitng ‘Dobkeratops’ with my new stick!

Enough of shooters, looking at the underside of the controller proudly declared what it’s designed for!

Time to fire up the some  Street Fighter action. I’ve recently brought the latest incarnation Street Fighter (IV) on the PC and haven’t had change to try it yet. Let’s see if my new stick can handle super combos.

Giving a Ken a nice Shoryuken to the chops. I might be out of practise but the stick seems to perform dragon punch and Hadouken fireballs with ease. Even Ex, Super and Ultra moves are completed about 9 out of 10 (again this might be me being out of practise).

Zangeif’s Spinning Piledriver was a little difficult to pull off though having to use a 360 rotational movement.

All in all, I’m quite please with it and for only £10 I can’t fault it. Time will tell if it lasts and my only criticism are the horrible button labels. I think i’ll order one more as a spare and possibly take the buttons into the garage and respray them a different color(s).

Hmm, wonder what that slot on the back could be used for?

Smoke Free?

I quit smoking at the beginning of last week and so far so good.  I had one iffy evening climbing the walls mid week but I’m starting to get through the day without actually thinking of cigarettes…it’s a weird feeling that I can’t describe but the sense of achievement seems to be ever more addictive. It’s early days yet but I’m feeling  more positive with each passing day.

For me, here’s the methods that seem to be working -

A) Really really really wanting to give up.

B) Writing down on our calendar each day how much I would have spent on cigarettes ( i worked this out at £150 per month/£1800 per year!) Curstie quit  last month so this is an annual saving of approx £3600.

C) Keep myself manically busy, whether it’s at home or work.

D) Plan ahead and find alternatives to smoking at key points of the day. For example, I usually have one straight after dinner, now I go for a walk around the garden and feed the fish.

E) Doing more of the things that make me happy including treating myself regulaly (new camera gear!).

Hope I can keep going

Retro Reunited – Sept 12th-13th

I completely forgot about the Retro Reunited event on the 12th-13th Sept. Hopefully my late order for a ticket manages to get through o.k.

Looking forward to this one especially as Jon Hare (Sensible Soccer/Cannon Fodder) and the legendary Archer McClean (Dropzone, IK+) are attending.

Plenty of old systems to get my mitts on as well as some i never seen or have wanted to see. There’s also a great selection of Mame and original arcade machines to play with. Should be a good one and will be taking my camera along – of course !!

http://www.retroreunited.info/