The X16's IEC port should support.... ANY IEC-serial Commodore drive?

rje · Post by **rje** » Fri Apr 23, 2021 9:30 pm

So supposing I bought the Retro Kool-Aid and decided to buy an actual IEC serial disk drive to go along with my X16. Because I'm a glutton for punishment or something.

The X16 just has "generic" IEC serial support. As a minimum. Right?

Would it therefore support any and all Commodore IEC serial disk drives?

For example, I could buy the first Commodore disk drive that crosses my price point + maintenance tolerance, and it would "work" (for some value of "work")?

Ah. Well. I know it won't necessarily work in any special modes. For example, if it doesn't support burst mode then a 1581 will be in "slow mode". But it will still work?

rje · Post by **rje** » Fri Apr 23, 2021 10:11 pm

You know, I think I'll answer my own question. Why would I buy old hardware that I cannot repair or maintain? If I really wanted that IEC experience, I could instead buy an SD2IEC or build a Pi1541.

ZeroByte · Post by **ZeroByte** » Fri Apr 23, 2021 10:30 pm

But... but you have to have the sound of a spinning disk punctuated by the periodic clicking sound of the RW head repositioning itself while you wait for your game to load....

rje · Post by **rje** » Fri Apr 23, 2021 10:31 pm

Ugh. Yeah. I suuuuure do miss that. A lot.

Snickers11001001 · Post by **Snickers11001001** » Fri Apr 23, 2021 10:35 pm

2 minutes ago, ZeroByte said:

But... but you have to have the sound of a spinning disk punctuated by the periodic clicking sound of the RW head repositioning itself while you wait for your game to load....

I think I saw someone was going to code up an extension for the pi1541 that allowed a speaker to output those sweet seek and spin sounds, sort of like the VICE emulator does.

kelli217 · Post by **kelli217** » Sat Apr 24, 2021 5:51 am

I don't know... maybe, maybe, there's someone out there who has a working drive and some disks with valuable information on them but doesn't have a working machine with an IEC port. This could be a potential archiving solution for them.

The other thing you can use an IEC port for is printing. Dig out your old MPS-802s, your DPS-1101s... your Star Micronics NX-10Cs...

svenvandevelde · Post by **svenvandevelde** » Wed Jun 02, 2021 3:25 pm

On 4/24/2021 at 12:30 AM, ZeroByte said:

But... but you have to have the sound of a spinning disk punctuated by the periodic clicking sound of the RW head repositioning itself while you wait for your game to load....

Ohhhh yesssss!

Rene Kint · Post by **Rene Kint** » Thu Jan 13, 2022 10:00 am

Might be late to the game to (try to) answer this - but the Programmer's Guide says there is a Commodore IEC Bus (not working yet) exposed, and that drive #8 is used for internal KERNAL commands to that interface. So I would lean towards a yes for support of an IEC bus device (like the SD2IEC which I love!)

Regards,

R.

Scott Robison · Post by **Scott Robison** » Thu Jan 13, 2022 2:08 pm

On 4/23/2021 at 4:11 PM, rje said:

You know, I think I'll answer my own question. Why would I buy old hardware that I cannot repair or maintain? If I really wanted that IEC experience, I could instead buy an SD2IEC or build a Pi1541.

I'm hoping it will work as I plan for pi2iec to eventually work with it.

BruceMcF · Post by **BruceMcF** » Mon Jan 17, 2022 8:28 pm

I expect it would work ... printer, plotter, etc. ... since once you run the IEC protocol well enough to access a 1541, it seems like you would be running it well enough for any other IEC device, aside from fast/burst mode access by 1571/1781/CMD drives.