Commodore 1541 RAM Drive


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A few years back I designed a 100% hardware compatible 1541 drive around an ATMega16 that used static ram instead of a physical floppy.

The advantage to doing this was that it was 100% compatible with all fast load cartridges and copy protection schemes. Raw GCR disk images were uploaded from PC to the ram via USB.

Before I moved on it was passing the physical drive test utilities that came with the original 1541s. Even had it driving a 16x2 LCD to indicate current track etc. You could even see the track number bounce between 0 and 1 when it does the well known head bump before formatting a disk.

I don't really have the time to convert it to VHDL but I'm sure it would run on Papilio. If anyone is interested, let me know and I will take some time to dig up the schematics and related stuff to post here.

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Wicked,

Very cool, it might be fun to get it working on the C/RAM Wing.

One day I, when I get some time, I was wanting to get the FPGA-64 project working on the Papilio Plus.

There is a full 1541 vhdl definition with that project, I don't see it in their package anymore but I have another copy that includes the 1541 definition. Biggest problem is that I don't think it is an Open Source license, we would have to identify the 1541 author and make sure its o.k. to release before doing much with it.

Jack.

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