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C64 disk transfer... basic questions...

C

clepsydrae

New Member
Joined
Sep 30, 2012
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8
Hi!

I'm just now getting around to attempting to extract the data from my ancient pile of C64 5.25" floppies (if they are even readable... some are approaching 30 years old...) I've been doing my research and wanted to confirm a couple things with the experts before I started spending money. :)

I'm leaning towards an FC5025 with their recommended drive. I do have some flippy disks that will need tending to... i planned to either mod the drive or each individual disk. (I just want to get the data off... don't need write access...)

I also have a pile of Amiga 3.5" disks somewhere that I may deal with in the future, which made me wonder if it would be wiser to go with some other kind of solution... e.g. an older PC with the appropriate connector for both drives and some other software I may not be aware of, but I couldn't sort through all the technical issues to know if that was even possible -- I believe that PC floppy controllers can't read Amiga disks anyway, so maybe it's moot? Just trying to think ahead... maybe I need to go with one of the more expensive solutions (DiscFerret when it's out, or Kyroflux?)

In terms of making the index hole for flippy disks: can one just punch a whole through the shell and media platter at any random spot? Or does that throw off the weight balance, if it matters? Or mangle the media? Or cause the sensor to fire too often? Is careful non-platter-touching surgery the only option?

I have maybe 10 or 15 flippy disks, so I could do careful surgery on each one if I had to... was just hoping to avoid it. I also considered making one sleeve with the index hole cut and then pulling the platters out of each disk and putting them in the temporary sleeve for reading... ? Crazy?

Any thoughts are much appreicated. Thanks!
-c
 
If you just want your disks archived, many people (Including myself) will do it for you.
I've got the equipment to dump Commodore 8bit, Amiga, Radio Shack coco, and Apple 5.25 and 3.5 floppies.

For the 8 bit commodores, I use a 1571 drive and a zoom floppy.
For the amiga, I just use the Amiga 1200 and an adf creator, Then just I use a compact flash card to transfer over to the pc.
For the Apple, ADTPro and a serial cable.
And for the coco, Drivewire of course.

Later,
dabone
 
Neither Amiga nor C64 floppies can be read on a normal PC floppy controller; you'd have to get a special-purpose disk controller like a Catweasel for that. The 1581 3.5" drive for the C64 and 128 uses compatible encoding, so 1581 disks can be read and written from a PC, and the 1571 can read and write PC-format floppies (though that's not its native format,) but as dabone says, if your only purpose is archival, it'd be much simpler to get someone else to do it for you.

With regards to the index hole, there's no point in adding it since the PC can't read those disks natively anyway.
 
I thought I there was a program out there that utilized a 5.25" and 3.5" drive to read those disks on a PC? Can't quite recall the name of the software though. (Teledisk? ImageDisk? even though it was sorta a hack). I can't quite recall though and it just might be for otherwise PC compatible formats.
 
There are plenty of programs that can handle disks with different geometry, but I dunno if there's such a beast as a program to reassemble GCR data as read by an MFM-only drive. I kinda doubt it, though.
 
commodorejohn said:
Neither Amiga nor C64 floppies can be read on a normal PC floppy controller; you'd have to get a special-purpose disk controller like a Catweasel for that.
Click to expand...
I think the FC5025 qualifies as a 'special-purpose' controller ;-)

With regards to the index hole, there's no point in adding it since the PC can't read those disks natively anyway.
Click to expand...
Again, we're talking about an FC5025 which can read the disk if the drive sends the data; the problem is that when you flip the disk the index hole doesn't line up with the sensor and most drives will not go ready and send data if they don't see any index pulses to indicate a spinning disk.

Using one 'master' sleeve with the hole punched and inserting the bare cookies is not crazy at all and is often done for various reasons, but there are also various other solutions; one of the simplest is a small magnet glued to the rotating part of the motor and a reed switch in parallel with the index sensor. The location is not important; it's just used to detect that the disk is spinning and is not related to the actual data in this case.
 
Last edited:
Thanks everyone!

Yeah, i was considering the reed switch thing (or other hacky methods i've been dreaming up) if the surgery/sleeve options turned out to be too tedious.

I take it that crudely punching a second index hole through the sleeve and cookie all at once is a bad plan? :)

@dabone - thanks so much for the generosity. I will definitely consider the offer... I have a whole bunch of disks to go through (60? 80?) and I'd hate to burden anyone with the tedium? I was planning to get the gear and then re-sell it... not sure if that's a little naive, but thought i might recoup some of the costs that way.

When it comes to the 3.5" Amiga disks - am I correct that no regular PC drive/controller can read an Amiga disk (without a magnetism-level reading controller like DiscFerret or Kyroflux)?

Thanks!
-c
 
Where are you located in the world, 1571's are cheap and so is the zoom floppy.
(nearly any commodore drive can be used, but the 1571 supports nib format without adding a parallel port to the drive)

The Zoom floppy is only $35.00 + shipping and requires a IEC style drive, but cannot read amiga floppies.
Kyroflux starts at $116 + power supply, it requires pc style drives, but can read the amiga floppies.
The FC5025 is $55.25, + 1.2 Meg Pc style floppy, read only and 5.25 disks only also. It also cannot read protected disks.(no amiga)

What ever route you take, you need to be able to clean your disk drive, old disks have a habit of gunking up the drives.

Good luck!

later,
dabone
 
I'm in the northwest US: Bellingham, WA... Thanks for clueing me in to the ZoomFloppy/1571 combo. Hadn't seen that yet.

The only 1571 I see on eBay is $90 with shipping, plus $10 for a cable, plus ZoomFloppy $35 = ~$140... FC5025 is $60.50 with ship, ~$50 for a TEAC drive shipped = ~$110... maybe 1571s come up that are cheaper, or i should look off of eBay?

Smarter to go with the more "modern" stuff for reliability, or smarter to go with a 1571 for closer hardware to what created the disks?

Re: Amiga; I do have an old PC with a floppy connector and a 3.5" drive... not sure if it can support two drives, but if so, sounds like i could use adfread and a second drive to get that done...

Thanks again,
-c
 
As for 1571's just keep watching, 2 sold last month on ebay for under 30.00. Also visit lemon64 forums and see if anyone has any extras for sale.
(Sorry, I'm down to 2 currently)
Are your disks copy protected originals or your own data?
If it's your own stuff then a 1541 will work fine, and if you add the parallel port mod to it, it will function just like the 1571 and do nibble transfers and copy most
copy protected disks.

As for the PC reading amiga disks, I've never used adfread, but that's going to be some OLD pc equipment to support it.
(P3 or so for the Intel stuff I sell, we dropped support for 2 floppys by the p4 days.)

Later,
dabone
 
I'm honestly not even sure what most of the 20 or so personal disks have on them, which is part of the mystery. The rest is a mix of originals (games, mostly) which I presume would be copy-protected, and a bunch of presumably-not-protected pirated disks my 12-year-old self ordered from a guy in FL. Oh how I would anticipate the mailman when a delivery was expected. :)

My 1541 has been in a garage attic in ohio for 20 years... I considered that route but it seems more complicated/error-prone?

Is there any chance that my little archive of stuff holds any programs that the C64 community would be interested in? Like, should i make a list of all the games/etc. and check it against some master list somewhere, or is that stuff all pretty exhaustively covered by now?

-c
 
Pretty much everything is dumped. Look at the following sites.

http://www.lemon64.com/
http://ftp.pokefinder.org/
http://noname.c64.org/csdb/
http://www.gamebase64.com/

My 1541 has been in a garage attic in ohio for 20 years... I considered that route but it seems more complicated/error-prone?
Click to expand...

But since you already have a 1541, I'd get a zoom floppy, and grab the 1541, CLEAN and lube it, and then see if you can read your disks.
If you can, then build the parallel port mod to dump the copy protected disks, or just download the cracked versions off the web.
It's no more error prone than buying a used commodore drive from some other source.

Later,
dabone
 
The setup I use is a 1541 drive attached to a home-made XE-1541 cable, and a program called The Star Commander running on a PC with FreeDos installed. It's a nice cheap setup and costs you 4 diodes, some solder, a 25 pin connector, and a Commodore serial cable. Not sure if it would work for copy-protected software, but everything else works great.

Your 1541 drive is probably still good. I have about 4 of them and they still work.
 
Yeah, Bungo's on the money. I use a XA-1541 cable (I used just generic full-size NPN transistors instead of the surface mounts most instructions say) which works even on my i7 870 machine through a USB to parallel adapter with my 1541.
http://sta.c64.org/xa1541.html

Works like a charm... and Bungo's also correct that the drive is probably still good despite sitting all that time -- there's so little to go wrong with them... though that was always the laugh with 5.25" disks and drives -- I've got trash 80 model 1 floppies that still read just as good as they did when they were written in 1979, while I have 3.5" floppies that don't work a week after I formatted them new.

Though... the 1541 does have more to go wrong with it than 'other' external drives for other platforms, since it does have an entire 6502 based computer of it's own inside.
 
Options options options. :) A good problem to have.

Does a Kryoflux do a better job of reading old/damaged floppies than a ZoomFloppy or 1541-with-cable kind of setup (assuming drives all clean/working, etc.)? I understand that it can image the low-level flux and that that gives it a lot more format flexibility, but i'm unclear as to whether it can read more "sensitively" as a result.

The old PC I have may in fact work with adfread... the BIOS allows configuration of the A and B floppies, which i've read means it will "probably" work.

So i'm torn between the cheaper DIY options of X*-1541 cable and use the old PC for the Amiga disks, vs. a Kryoflux and a 5.25 drive for both the C64 and Amiga disks (i have a couple 3.5" drives already)... the added cost wouldn't really be worth it (as everyone here is clearly saying) unless the Kryoflux was better at reading the disks than my 30-year old 1541...
 
You might ask your kryoflux questions to them or on the kryoflux forum. They've historically been pretty quick to respond to folks asking questions about the product. They pop up on other forums here and there for announcements but I'm sure don't have that much time to monitor for everything. It's my understanding that the Kryoflux backs up lots and lots of formats (it's geared to be an all-in-one solution from what I can tell to back up as many formats as it can off one drive). The problem is it backs it up to some huge format that it doesn't support writing back to disk and I'm not sure if anything else supports that format yet. You can email it to them or send it to them and they'll convert it to an ipf for you that you can write back if it supports that and some emulators they've talked into supporting ipf files as images.

While I love the concept it still seems (I just re-read the faq) like a one way archive where I rip it to their format, they get all the disks we all rip in their collection then mail us back something (whether its ours or a copy they already created) and then we can possibly recreate that file. But they're restricted to their free time so I don't know how timely it is submitting anything to them for conversion (that'd be interesting to hear from folks who have). If it had write support and wasn't so proprietary (as in I could keep my collection local to me and not rely on them needing to capture anything I rip as well) I'd buy one and probably already would have by now. I'm really waiting for that day though, then I'd gladly check it out and contribute.
 
Thanks, I will ask at their forum as well.

I'm pretty sure the Kryoflux software dumps to either their stream format (which i understand to be an open format at this point?), as well as various image formats... from their site:

"KryoFlux supports dumping any floppy disk to “stream files”, which contain the low level flux transition information present on a disk. It also supports output of a range of common “sector dumps” to allow you to use your dumped images right away in your favourite emulator. The currently supported disk image formats are:" [includes Amiga and C64 formats...]

...I think it can write to disks as well... "KryoFlux can read and write data with no regard for what disk format or copy protection a disk may contain."

Let me know if I'm missing something. :)
 
There a post here from August 28th 2012 which pointed out they have the ability to write ipfs for several formats so far but not Commodore 64 (Amiga is what they first did at at one point only supported). The quote from Vince (could be outdated though) was "as of today there are IPFs for Amiga, Atari ST, Spectrum, CPC and PC. " so those formats can possibly be rewritten to a physical disk today. Although it reads many more formats as a stream file as you already pointed out.
 
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