uIEC/SDI have spent a fair amount of time these past few months tinkering with nostalgic, vintage computing. Particularly with my favorite Commodore 8-bit line in the VIC 20 and the 128.  I thought that the only way to restore old binary programs and diskette images back to its original state was to buy an original floppy drive, interface it to a Linux PC with a XEM 1541 cable adapter, and running the OpenCBM filesystem.  While that setup works great, boy, was I wrong about that being the only way …

There is the tiny homebrew electronics project called uIEC (and the SD refers to its media format).  That’s right, SD as in a secure disk memory card.  I purchased two Transcend 2GB SD cards for less than $15.  My workstation is not equipped with any flash memory reader, so I got an inexpensive Kingston MobileLite USB 2.0 9-in-1 reader for my Vista64 workstation.  Populating it with vintage programs and diskette images is as easy as Copy & Paste.

So I can essentially have every 8-bit program that I have ever owned, played, or will ever have the time to play on just one of those memory cards, with the other serving as a backup.  Simply elegant, simply incredible!  Documentation is non-existent with this device, but the firmware project, SD2IEC, which this is based on has a decent README text file.  I converted it to a more friendly reading PDF format.

uIEC/SD controllerIt proudly boasts, “Possibly the World’s smallest IEC-compatible CBM hard drive!”  Measuring in at 1.5″ by 1.5″ by 0.3″ — I just have to say, “Definitely.”

Contact Jim Brain before ordering, to make certain he has any left.  Ordering was as easy as sending a PayPal payment of $55.00 USD to brain@jbrain.com.