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Commodore C-II drive

Indus GT....I remember those, and the ads.
Those were the absolute COOLEST looking drives around.

Were they on any other platform besides Atari and Commodore?
Any Apple GT's for example?


Tony
 
Yep:

Indus advertisment said:
A flick of its power switch can turn an Atari into a Ferrari. Or an Apple into a Red Hot Apple.
Click to expand...

I believe the Commodore version may have been the last one they issued. Apparently the GT contains its own Z80, so no luck in loading 6502 code into the drive memory. I don't know to which extent Atari and Apple disk drives could execute arbitrary code anyway, but the Commodore ones do.

You may be interested in the pictures from George Page's former collection, now owned by Bo Zimmerman:

http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/pictures/gpage1/index.html

One could ask yourself how Indus got away with referring to Porsche, Ferrari and other brands. Maybe trade mark owners were not quite as aware back in the days. I doubt they could do that today without striking a license deal with the other brand, like how Acer sells Ferrari branded computers.
 
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Am I the only one to notice the sticker that says "Laser Micro-Systems Inc."?
For some reason, that company name sounds familiar.
You might check the back pages of BYTE magazines from 1984 or 1985.

And I think there's somewhere to do a search for that FCC ID, which might yield some information.
 
ahm said:
Am I the only one to notice the sticker that says "Laser Micro-Systems Inc."?
For some reason, that company name sounds familiar.
You might check the back pages of BYTE magazines from 1984 or 1985.

And I think there's somewhere to do a search for that FCC ID, which might yield some information.
Click to expand...

No luck searching for "Laser Micro-Systems, Inc."... And no luck on the FCC ID number search either... FCC's website seems to only search back to 1987, so this device would pre-date that.

As for what it's worth... Well, post it on eBay and find out! ;-)

-Andrew
 
So, for a C= user, was that a good thing?
Were those drives reliable?

I guess they at least SORT OF were, as this one can still read!!


Tony
 
Late follow-up.

Been going through and separating the C= stuff out to get it out the door.
Decided to pop the C-II open, and inside are (2) Mitsubishi M5L2764K 8KB EPROMs. Isn't the 1541 a single 8K? Or 2?

Anyone want a dump of the ROMs?

The drive is strange as well - Chinon F051.
Has (1) 6502, (2) 6522's and a Toshiba TMM2016P

Drive has a 20-pin cable going to the PCB, reminiscent of the Apple cable, and an unpopulated area for a 2nd connector!
There's also 2 solder pads bridged, as well.

T
 
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The 1541 has 2x8 = 16K ROM. It also has one 6502 and two 6522's, so in that respect your drive is no oddball. I don't know the model numbers of 5.25" drive mechs.

I'm sure the Commodore community would appreciate a ROM dump. It could also be used to determine how compatible it is.
 
I looked, and Zimmer's site, which has the firmware, is a bit confusing.
Some of the links in the 1541 section are a bit wierd. Says 1541, links to 1540-xxxx
Stuff like that.

I dumped them, and have them with me.
PM me with who to email them to


T
 
Sent an email to zimmers (bo at) with a CC to you, Anders.
(2) 8kb .bin files attached.

These are straight dumps, on a Logical Systems writer/reader (XPro 48?)


T
 
I'm sure they're fine. As Glenn Holmer on the cbm-hackers list pointed out, visually your drive resembles an Enhancer. It might be worthwhile to compare ROM dumps between those two drives in particular, given that someone dumped the Enhancer.
 
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