Thursday, April 28, 2011

#c64 Disk swapping WORKING on my uIEC (and so is GEOS)

I finally got disk swapping working on my uIEC/SD. I followed the instructions on various web sites to the letter but it never worked. I finally deleted the AUTOSWAP.LST file and created it again on my work PC instead of my iMac at home. Voila! Worked like a champ! The Mac must put extra data in the file, as it was twice the size it should have been.

I tried GEOS and it works VERY well on the uIEC. You do have to have it programmed as device 8, but it works. I was able to "swap" through 4 different GEOS disk images to launch GeoWrite, GeoPaint, and several other programs.

I'm eager to hunt though multi-disk games now and get them working. I know the first few will be Skate or Die, Wasteland, Gunship, and F-19 Stealth Fighter.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Running GEOS on my #c64

Booted GEOS on the 64 just to see it again. I need to figure out how to swap disks on the UIEC to launch apps, but I read online it probably won't work anyhow. Well,  it looks nice. I also downloaded some word processing software. Going to try those next.

Monday, April 25, 2011

#c64 on s-video

I received the s-video cable I purchased on eBay and it works very well. It took a bit to get the mono audio working right but it is dialed in now. Looking forward to gaming with it this week.

Monday, April 4, 2011

#c64 Fastload

Got this Fastload Cartridge on eBay for dirt cheap. It's a little faded and beat up but it works. I had one when I had my 64 in the 80's and it was a huge time saver for disk tasks and decreased the load times quite a bit. I do notice it doesn't work on very much these days as everything seems to have fastloaders of some type baked in, but this is good for nostalgia. And the commands are all coming back to me!

Saturday, April 2, 2011

DraBrowse and uIEC #c64

Not sure how I missed this but I found DraBrowse while testing DraCopy. If you are looking for a simple file browser / launcher for the uIEC,  this is it. Fast directory browsing and launching. This one's the winner. HINT: You can use cursor left and right to get in and out of d64 images. This isn't in the instructions.

Arkanoid and DraCopy

I've been using CBM Command to navigate my uIEC and it works very well. However on directories,  it takes a long time to enumerate directories and scroll through them. I went hunting for other file managers and found DraCopy. It has a lot more bugs, but it does navigate directories faster. I think I will use both for now.

Here's a nice game of Arkanoid I launched using DraCopy. 

#c64 Contiki Web Browsing

I finally got Contiki working on my Commodore 64 by loading it from my new uIEC device. It never worked on my IDE64 but the uIEC seems to work well in conjunction with the IDE64+RR-NET. I was able to web browse on my first try. It is a bit challenging to find web sites that render well enough to read,  but it is fun and now I can say I've browsed the web on the 64.

Friday, April 1, 2011

Finally, Raid on Bungeling Bay via uIEC #c64

Thanks to the new uIEC/SD device I received, I was able to get one of my favorites to finally work, Raid on Bungeling Bay! I was never able to get the d64 to work right on my IDE64 and was always too lazy to move it to floppy -- it was just easier to play it via emulation. But now I have it working on the genuine hardware and it is as awesome as ever.

I received my uIEC/SD device the other day and moved my entire collection over. It took a while for me to get the hang of it. The trick was to make sure it was on device 8 instead of 10. To make it easy on myself, I use CBM-COMMAND to navigate folders and mount d64 images. I'm looking forward to this new era of disk compatibility that wasn't there with the IDE64. I do still love the ease of that device, but the iIEC seems a lot more compatible with d64 images.