X1541/Star Commander

[Flack]

Has anyone else messed with one of these things?

For the uninitiated, an X1541 is a cable that lets you connect an old Commodore 1541 disk drive to your PC via the parallel port, allowing you to transfer Commodore 64 floppies over to your PC for use with an emulator. As we all know, diskettes don't last forever, and some of my Commodore 64 ones are hitting the 20 year mark this year. I'd like to move my entire C64 collection (700+ disks) over to the PC before they stop working.

After a bit of finagling, I got mine to work last night. Since apparently you have to boot into true DOS mode, I went out to the garage and grabbed that 486/100 I've been saving for that *special* occasion, threw a HD in it and blew Windows 98 onto it. Booting into DOS, it works like a champ, except...

...it's SLOW. Not the computer itself, but the transferring process. It took close to 10 minutes to do one diskette. With 700 disks, that's ... well, a lot of minutes. Has anyone else messed with these before? Was it as slow on your setup? I'm wondering if the speed of the computer isn't slowing down the transfer as well, although I can't imagine the PC itself being the slowest part of the chain (I'm guessing that falls on the parallel port).

Also, I used Star Commander 0.82. Is that still the de facto software for doing this, or is there something newer I don't know about?

[robotriot]

For speed, try changing your parallel port mode in the BIOS setup (either ECP or EPP are the fastest modes iirc). Also, there are different copying speeds you can select in SC (turbo being the fastest one I think), the faster the more error-prone the copying process is though. I've only written to the 1541 so far, maybe copying from the C64 is even slower though, no idea. Anyway, my experience is that 5.25" disks are relatively reliable in contrary to 3.5" disks, and if there's nothing personal on the disks, I don't quite see the use of backing them up as pretty much every game can be downloaded from the net nowadays. Backing up original software is something else of course.

[98PaceCar]

When I was playing with it, I remember it being slow too. I think there were some upgraded cables that would help performance, but I may be thinking of something else. I'll set mine up tonight and see if I can get it to transfer something. I think I've still got the software on my laptop.

[Flack]

I actually bought the XE1541 cable, which is supposed to work on faster computers. I guess it does work in faster computers, but I couldn't get Star Commander to work in Windows, only DOS.

Default settings were turbo and my parallel port is ECP so it sounds like I was doing everything right. I dumped one disk into D64 format and it took close to 10 minutes (closer to 8).

I just downloaded the 3CD C64 GameBase collection and I realize that most if not all of the games I owned are in there, but many of the versions I have are the ones cracked by me and my friends, so I'd like to preserve those versions if at all possible.

[Mayhem]

Can't see why it would be taking so long if you've got the speed settings on Turbo. StarCommander is the main reason I'm still running my 486/66 at home (and that's got DOS6.21 and Win3.1 on it!). I'll have a look at my setup tonight and post it up, see if you can figure out from it why you are so slow. The only thing offhand possibly is that you are still theoretically "in Windows" even by going to DOS mode with Win98. You may need a proper copy of DOS installed on there and avoid booting to Windows at all. Have you tried ticking the ASYNC box in the config?

As long as all your disks are without copy protection, then there shouldn't be a problem transfering them all.

[Flack]

I did the old F8/Command Prompt Only when booting up, so it would have been in pure DOS. I don't have anything important on there, I guess I could blow it away and throw 6.22 on there. I just wanted to have Windows so I could then network the games off of there.

[Mayhem]

I had a check of StarCom on my machine tonight... you got transfer mode set to Warp, command exec set to Warp and the cable set to XE1541? If so and it's still slow, it's probably some port problem or the fact you're through Windows still even though you've booted to DOS (type exit and you go to Win98 I believe, just like as if you were in a windowed command prompt).

[Flack]

I had a check of StarCom on my machine tonight... you got transfer mode set to Warp, command exec set to Warp and the cable set to XE1541? If so and it's still slow, it's probably some port problem or the fact you're through Windows still even though you've booted to DOS (type exit and you go to Win98 I believe, just like as if you were in a windowed command prompt).

I'll check my settings tonight and confirm that everything's on warp.

[icbrkr]

It takes a few minutes to format a disk using this, however, the 1541 was *never* a fast drive. Hooking it up to a PC doesn't make it go much faster :)

It takes about 3 minutes to format a 1541 disk for me to write a D64 disk to a real 1541. And I'll agree with everyone else: Use DOS or an older version of Windows (95/98) and if using Windows, definetly turn on Async mode or it'll run dog slow or not at all.

[Flack]

Instead of warp, I had everything set to normal. I changed it to warp and it's going much faster now -- closer to how I remember it running the first time I tried this a few years ago! Thanks for the help guys.

[Mayhem]

At warp speed (and make sure you changed BOTH I mentioned to it) copying a disc takes about 90 seconds and formatting a disk takes about 10 seconds. As long as the drive is in balance and aligned okay, shouldn't be a problem with it operating at those speeds.

[Flack]

At warp speed (and make sure you changed BOTH I mentioned to it) copying a disc takes about 90 seconds and formatting a disk takes about 10 seconds. As long as the drive is in balance and aligned okay, shouldn't be a problem with it operating at those speeds.

Giving myself 2 minutes per diskette then (including swapping disk time and catalogging) ...

2 minutes * 1400 sides = ~47 hours. Yikes.

Better get started. :)