OpenCBM
Posted on January 3rd, 2010 by Rob
With it freezing and snowing today, I decided to make use of the idle time by hooking up my pristine VIC-1541 floppy disk drive to my workstation and do some file archiving to real 5-1/4″ media using OpenCBM under Linux.
OpenCBM provides an API library and some useful command-line tools. The following is an example of how to format and copy Commodore files to the floppy drive:
$ sudo modprobe cbm $ dmesg | tail cbm_init: using passive (XM1541) cable (auto), irq 7 cbm: resetting devices cbm: waiting for free bus... $ cbmctrl detect 8: 1540 or 1541 $ cbmctrl command 8 "N0:VIC20 3-JAN-2010,10" $ cbmctrl status 8 00, ok,00,00 $ cbmctrl dir 8 0 ."vic20 3-jan-2010" 10 2a 664 blocks free. 00, ok,00,00 $ cbmwrite 8 quikman+8k.prg [Info] writing quikman+8k.prg -> QUIKMAN+8K.PRG,P,W [Info] identified a 1540 or 1541 drive ............- [Info] 00, OK,00,00 $ cbmwrite 8 omega-fury.prg [Info] writing omega-fury.prg -> OMEGA-FURY.PRG,P,W [Info] identified a 1540 or 1541 drive ....................\ [Info] 00, OK,00,00 $ cbmctrl dir 8 0 ."vic20 3-jan-2010" i1 2a 47 "quikman+8k.prg" prg 76 "omega-fury.prg" prg 541 blocks free. 00, ok,00,00
Of course, I can now hook-up this drive to a real VIC 20 computer and play what’s on the diskette(s). But for giggles, I can even use the Commodore 8-bit emulator, VICE, to test drive my floppies, for example:
$ xvic -memory 8k -device8 2 +truedrive \ -keybuf 'LOAD "QUIKMAN+8K.PRG",8\0D' ... sucessfully loaded libopencbm.so /dev/cbm opened. ...
VICE 2.2 on a 24" HP display
Nice!
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After copying a bunch of files to a real floppy, you can make a backup of the media using the d64copy command, i.e.,
$ time d64copy -w -v 8 vic20.d64
[Info] Trying to identify drive type
[Info] drive 08 (1541): 00, OK,00,00
[Info] copying tracks 1-35 (683 sectors)
1: *********************
2: *********************
3: *********************
4: *********************
5: *********************
6: *********************
7: *********************
8: *********************
9: *********************
10: *********************
11: *********************
12: *********************
13: *********************
14: *********************
15: *********************
16: *********************
17: *********************
18: *******************
19: *******************
20: *******************
21: *******************
22: *******************
23: *******************
24: *******************
25: ******************
26: ******************
27: ******************
28: ******************
29: ******************
30: ******************
31: *****************
32: *****************
33: *****************
34: *****************
35: ***************** 100% 683/683
683 blocks copied.
real 1m22.080s
user 0m2.073s
sys 1m15.706s