Hooking vintage computers up to the PC

[calthaer]

Recently I've been trying to get my Laser 128 (Apple II clone) to connect to my PC so that I can download all my old Bard's Tale characters and play them on an emulator. A few guys on the newsgroups are doing this as well...it's a fairly involved process!

Anyone else done something similar to this? Maybe not necessarily with an Apple, but a C64 or any "vintage" computer.

[KJN]

Anyone else done something similar to this? Maybe not necessarily with an Apple, but a C64 or any "vintage" computer.
Well on a C64 it should be easy. Just get a XE1541 cable (there is one on eBay here (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=1247&item=4123463666&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW) or buy it here (http://sta.c64.org/x1541shop.html) or build it (http://www.geocities.com/vteramos/Paginas/XE1541en.html) yourself) to connect the C64 diskdrive to the PC then use a program called Star Commander (http://sta.c64.org/sc.html) to transfer files back and forth between the C64 and PC.

If you have a C64 it's a must.

[Ze_ro]

I had built an X1541 cable a long, long time ago in order to copy some disks so I could play them on a real C-64... but a few years back I found a pair of interesting programs: 64HDD and server64 (I forget which, but I was only able to get one of them to work, I think it was 64HDD)... basically, the idea was that you used an X1541 cable to hook the serial port of the C-64 (or just include it in the drive chain) up to the parallel port of a PC... the program would then serve up files through the cable as if it were a regular disk drive. You could also have directory structures and store .d64 images on the PC and "attach" them with some PRINT# statements.

I set up an old 486 with an 80MB hard drive, no monitor and no keyboard solely to act as a hard drive for my C-128, and it works fairly well. The only problem was that the CMOS battery on the 486 was dead, so if I turned the computer off, it would forget all the drive geometry, which was a huge pain in the ass.

--Zero

[Nature Boy]

I know it's an old topic - but I didn't even realize this forum was here until recently (I'm lazy - I don't scroll down much)...

I'm an avid user of the SIO2PC cable and APE for Windows (to connect my 800XL to a spare laptop I own). It's *very* reassuring to have something instead of the 1050 Disk Drives for playing games. And of course it's nice having an even larger pirate collection that much easier to maintain :D

(One of these days I'm going to upload my MicroLeague baseball GM disk so that I can still play with those Blue Jays teams I created way back in the day :) )

[Jibbajaba]

I have hooked my Apple ][+ into my pc using telix in order to make disks out of disk images. Pretty limited though due to the limitations of the ][+.