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 or buy it here or build it yourself) to connect the C64 diskdrive to the PC then use a program called Star Commander 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

(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 ][+.