Commander X16

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?

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.

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....

 

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

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. 

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... 

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!

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.

 

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.

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.