DiskBuddy64 is a minimal adapter that can interface a Commodore 1541(II) floppy disk drive to your PC via USB in order to read from and write on disks. It uses its own fast loader to minimize the transfer times. The DiskBuddy64 is controlled via a command line interface or a graphical front end written in Python.

This is not my project. This is an open source project that i used to build out these adapters. It started as a desire for one adapter, but i could not find one, so i bought enough parts to make a batch.

Software and instructions are found here, along with license: https://oshwlab.com/wagiminator/c64-diskbuddy64

Greaseweazle allows versatile floppy drive control over USB. By extracting the raw flux transitions from a drive, any (eg. copy-protected) disk format can be captured and analyzed - PC, Amiga, Amstrad, PDP-11, musical instruments, industrial equipment, and more. The Greaseweazle also supports writing to floppy disks, from a range of image file formats including those commonly used for online preservation (ADF, IPF, DSK, IMG, HFE, etc).

Reads and writes 3", 3.5", 5.25", 8" disks (with suitable drive and cable). Buffered outputs, for communicating with older 5.25" and 8" disk drives. Integrated power connector for directly powering most 3.5" disk drives. Write-enable jumper can be removed for safer preservation of precious vintage disks. Supports flippy-modded 5.25" drives. Supports Disk-Change detection as used by Rob Smith's integration into the WinUAE Amiga emulator. 3 user-definable outputs (eg. 8" interface REDWC signal). 100% factory tested, and tested again by me before shipping.

A passive board that sits under the 6522 VIA in the Commodore 1541 disk drive allowing the device ID number to be changed without cutting the jumpers on the 1541 mainboard and instead routing the signals to two pairs of pin headers, which can then be used with jumpers or wired to DIP switches. The two sets of pin headers determine the device ID. They can then be opened or closed using pin header jumpers or wired to external DIP switches (may require cutting the 1541 case).

It is possible to use DIP switches without modifications to the 1541 case but it's not ideal. The fuse holder has some space between the case and holder which is just enough to sneak some 24AWG or thinner wires through. Obviously this is not the best way to do it, but it doesn't block access to any of the ports, and doesn't require any case cutting.

These are designed as a drop-in replacement for the original aging and power hungry ROMs. Unlike other designs and 28 to 24 pin EPROM adapters, these hide all the ugly stuff out of sight to provide the cleanest possible look. Power consumption is around 5mA (25mW) vs the 70mA (350mW) of the original mask ROMs. As such these run completely cool and consume a fraction of the power, ensuring they will almost certainly outlast all the originals and help lower the overall temperature of your machine.

Variants

• Commodore Character ROM
  • 901225-01 - Standard drop-in replacement
  • 901225-01+ - Switchable between regular C64 font and PET style font using a tiny switch on the underside of the board.
• 1541 Kernal/Hi-ROM
  • 901229-05 - Standard drop-in replacement
  • 901229-05 with licensed JIFFYDOS - switchable, really needs a JiffyDOS kernal in the 64 also

Not suitable for the C64 shortboard rev. 250469 or the 1541-II.

We at Bitbinders have been developing professional hardware and software solutions since 1982. Our founder had a very long love affair with Commodore computers (and a shorter fling with Atari's!) He founded BitBinders decades ago and mostly did programming to enhance his main career as an engineer and later as an manufacturing executive. There were many developments but perhaps two of the more interesting included some pretty fancy linear programming for foundries and early-90's machine vision for controlling welders. Non-main career commercial successes included "RadBench", a Visual Basic add-on licensed and published by the Crescent Division of Progress Software. His "second career" is now focused on BitBinders retro-computing products, grown from a true passion for retro-computing.

The really interesting thing is that they sell replicas of the Commodore 1581 3.5" floppy drive that are 100% compatible. They sell a couple of variants (one and two drive units) and are engineered with future upgrades and repairs in mind. They're pretty expensive but they're re-implementations using modern components. They also sell replacement power supplies for Commodore computers.

ArduinoFDC is a sketch that implements a floppy disk controller. It works with Arduino Uno, Leonardo, Nano, Pro Mini, Micro and Mega.

ArduinoFDC consists of three parts:

• A library providing low-level functions to allow reading and writing disks at the sector level as well as low-level formatting disks.
• Integration of ChaN's brilliant FatFS library to provide file-level functions for reading and writing files and directories in a FAT (MS-DOS) file system and a high-level format function to initialize a FAT file system.
• An example sketch implementing ArduDOS, a (very) small DOS environment for browsing a FAT file system as well as a low-level disk monitor to access sector data on the disk, including the ability to transfer whole disks or single files via the XModem protocol.

ArduinoFDC works with double density (DD) as well as high density (HD) disk drives. It can read, write and format 5.25" DD (360KB), 5.25" HD (1.2MB), 3.5" DD (720KB) and 3.5" HD (1.44MB) disks.

Rescuezilla is an easy-to-use disk cloning and imaging application that's fully compatible with Clonezilla — the industry-standard trusted by tens of millions. Yes, Rescuezilla is the Clonezilla GUI (graphical user interface) that you might have been looking for. But Rescuezilla is more than a Clonezilla GUI! Disk imaging is the process of making a backup of your computer's hard drive which is managed as files stored on an external hard drive, and 'disk cloning' is the process of making a direct copy without needing a third drive for temporary storage. For many people, the alternative open-source tools such as Clonezilla are intimidating and difficult to use, so Rescuezilla provides an easy-to-use graphical environment like the leading commercial tools, Acronis True Image and Macrium Reflect.

Rescuezilla can be booted on any PC or Mac from a USB stick, and has been carefully developed to be fully interoperable with the Clonezilla. This means Rescuezilla can restore backups created by Clonezilla, and backups created by Rescuezilla can be restored using Clonezilla!

A company that sells NOS (new old stock) floppy disks and floppy drives. Mostly 3.5", some 5.25" and even 8". Still sealed and recycled disks. Can transfer stuff from floppy disks en masse as a service. They also buy lots of floppies.

DiskScan is a Unix/Linux tool to scan a block device and check if there are unreadable sectors. In addition it uses read latency times as an assessment for a near failure as sectors that are problematic to read usually entail many retries (and bog the system down). This can be used to assess the state of the disk and maybe decide on a replacement in advance of its imminent failure. The disk self test may or may not pick up on such clues depending on the disk vendor decision making logic.

badblocks looks for fatal issues already happening and diskscan is for upcoming issues that can be fixed.

Also, badblocks is essentially obsolete in this day and age since the disks themselves will reallocate the data and there is no real need to map the bad blocks in the filesystem level anymore.

In the AUR. Works quite well, and sussed out a dying drive on Leandra.

A utility that lets you edit disks and recover data, including entire partitions. Supports multiple operating systems.

A poster of every extant processor, socket, module, and jack in use by computers today. Comprehensive and impressive. You can even buy a print of it if you want.