Floppy disks and the internet.
[the publish date is retroactively published]
When I was 14, I got the Commodore format magazine. Aside from the ‘free games and demos’ on the Powerpack tape, it came with game reviews, articles on what your C64 could do and adverts for peripherals.
One peripheral I wanted was a floppy disk drive. Here is that advert I drooled over for five years…
As a teenager with part-time jobs, £149.99 was WAYY off for me to even buy one, it also didn’t help that our town centre, which sold plenty of tape games, didn’t sell many, if at all, floppy disk versions of games. SO drooled over I did.
Another peripheral I wanted was a modem – however, I kind of knew my parents wouldn’t t allow me anyway, as this came with hefty phone bills, here is an excerpt from Issue 3 of the Commodore Format.
I knew I could do a lot more with my 8-bit computer, but I never got the chance. But I’m now 47 and 3/4, and I have a bit more pocket money, and no one can tell me off! So, I bought an SD2IEC and a Strikelink wifi modem.
Let’s start with the SD2IEC (from The Future Was 8 Bit) and bust some myths.
This nifty little device connects an SD card via the Serial port (or IEC) to the C64. It is NOT an emulator. Instead, you can use high-level DOS commands and interface to it. Along with the CBM Browser (also available from GitHub), you can mount/run disks. It can swap disks for you with a touch of a button and an autoswap.lst file. It is more like a Hard Disc (like the CMD one) drive than a floppy disk drive.
It is like having one of these, but larger and smaller at the same time! (Large in capacity, small as in it fits in your hand!) However, thanks to many failures on Commodore’s behalf, this is as slow as the floppy disk drive! In other words, it works perfectly! The great thing about the SD2IEC is you can organise the floppy disk images you have downloaded off the internet. However, there is one slight caveat. The C64 sorts them in the order you put them on the disk rather than in alpha/numeric order. To run games from one disk image, this is great, as well as running single PRG files or anything more complicated, as it doesn’t have the DOS ROM found in a standard
1541 floppy drive.
I loaded it with music from
High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC) as well as a few games and was well away! The next thing I did was download
CCGMS, after a bit of faffing around with the
manual, I got online! I was on the internet like it was 1990! I was bouncing for joy like a teenage kid when I did this, as this was something I always wanted to do! Yes, Ok, the floppy disk drive was an SD card, and the modem is pretending to be a Hayes Modem, but online I did and using floppy disk commands (LOAD “*”,8,1), I was. I hate to say it, but this won’t be the last time I bounce for joy with my C64! Oh, and a BBS I recommend?
PARTICLES! BBS. They have been running for DECADES now and are still going strong. But connecting to another C64 using the internet was a surreal moment.
Now I feel like a rich kid. However, this just gave me the itch of wanting to do more with my 8-bit computer…