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Welcome to the 1541 Ultimate Website!!
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Update January 29, 2010 Finally, you might think! An update on the 1541U-II... As time is going fast, the moment that all the hardware parts for the 1541U-II will be ready is drawing near. It all was not too easy, but things are going now the way they should. The major difficulty showed to be the plastic case. Finally I have found a contractor who is willing to make the plastic case exactly as I wanted it, for a reasonable price. Unfortunately, the mould for plastic injection is quite expensive; in fact about double of what I expected initially, based on an unrealistic quote that I got a few months ago. Because of the large interest in the 1541U-II, I decided to just continue with it, and leave the selling price of the total product intact. Earlier this week, I received the first pictures of the first try-outs of the injection mould tool. The result shows a little problem in the design, with the planned material (ABS). Due to the thick and sturdy plastic constuction on the inside, sink marks are visible on the outside. The manufacturer has tried to run the case with a different material (PA), which looks a lot better. However, due to different shrinkage characteristics, the mould tool needs to be adapted to adjust for the difference in material. (You can see this, that the matte version does not close perfectly...) They will do this, but it will take one week extra before the cases are ready. The final color won't be black (unless I am getting a lot of angry E-mails now.. ;-), but light cream color, to match the C64C better. 
The bare boards were manufactured in China this time, and had been delivered to the assembly company, which is currently working on the first 100 pieces of 1541U-II boards. I am expecting the hardware boards within 2 weeks! Then I can start testing and programming them. And then the software… I am very busy porting and reordering the existing code base to the “Ultimate V2.0”. Actually, most of the code is being rewritten from the base up, to give it more structure and better maintainability. As announced on the website, the 1541U-II will have a USB port. Although it was quite some work to write the host-controller for the FPGA and the software stack to access the port, it is now starting to work quite well. At this point, USB pen-drives are recognized. The directory and files can be read from it, just like the 1541U-I could do on the SD-card. Further fine-tuning is necessary and integration with the existing software still needs to be done. The first release, 1541U-II V2.0 (alpha), will be functional, but sober... Updates will follow to add the "sauce" to the cartridge.
Hopefully I will have some help by mid-February to pack and ship the finalized units, and answer the non-technical E-mails. With the delay incurred in the project, I want to be able to ship out as efficiently as possible.
As for the financial aspect, I am accepting payments now. If everything worked as it should, you saw the total amount due when you ordered. Payment instructions can be found on the website under “Ordering Info”. |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 29 January 2010 20:38 )
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1541 Ultimate II announcement |
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Dear 1541 Ultimate enthusiasts, Some of you might have noticed that the order form has been temporarily closed, and many questions and rumours have been going around about the future of the 1541 Ultimate. The reason behind all this, is that behind the screens I have been working on a successor of the "1541 Ultimate". How this unit will be called has not yet been determined, but it could be something as simple as "1541 Ultimate II" or "Ultimate Cartridge". What is it, and why was it designed? Basically, it is a scaled down version of the 1541U. It will provide similar functionality, although some things have been changed. It will no longer support full-size SD-cards, but only MircoSD, or "Transflash". Also, Ethernet will not be supported until further notice. It will support tape emulation out of the box (without the need for special FPGA images) and it will provide a real-time clock function with battery back up. Audio output has been significantly improved, which might seem useless for just the drive sounds, but this enables the creation of FPGA images that provide additional sound channels of useful quality. The power consumption has been reduced as well. There is one extra cool feature that will not yet be disclosed ;-) And last but not least... This unit will come with a case! At least, that is the plan; there are some negociations going on with manufacturers for plastic insertion moulding. It seems feasible to have this done, although it's pricy for low quantities. A prototype is 3D-printed this week; the prototype board is already there and functional. Now, speaking of the case.... Since I like to keep the high compatibility with the 1541, the big DIN connector is still there on the board. It might be an option to use a custom connector for this, with a custom cable that needs to be made for this unit, but to be honest, this does not have my personal preference. I would need to have these made separately, and stock them separately as well. So, let's say that the big DIN connector is a fact, how do we enclose this? There are two options; which are shown below: 
And the second option is: 
As you can see, the first one has a "strange" bulge, but is for the rest rather elegant, while the second one is symmetrical, but bulkier. Which of the two it should be, I don't know.. Maybe I'll open a poll for this, what do you think? Availability: It will still take around 12 weeks before these units can be delivered; which means late October 2009. Price: I tried to keep the price acceptable. Due to the case, it has to go up just slightly though. The selling price including tax is € 125; (excluding: € 105). Please let me know what you think. Regards, Gideon |
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Hello all! It has been quite some time since I have written anything on this page, and I thought it was about time. I am still getting a lot of questions regarding the batches and stock. As of now, d.d. 2009-06-14, I have only 14 ethernet boards left in stock, and 32 'plus' boards (and some batch 1 'plus' boards). There are 6 open (paid) orders for Ethernet, so my stock will be only 8 by tomorrow! There are even more unpaid open orders, so I think I will run a small batch of Ethernet boards in the coming weeks. Note, that this will probably be the LAST batch of these boards being produced. I can tell that version 1.7 of the firmware is about to come out. I need to do some additional testing and fixing, but I hope to be able to finish it by the end of this week. Some parts of code were already (erroneously) checked into the archive, and I saw that some stuff has already "leaked out" into the forum. Yes, version 1.7 will include a fully functional SID player, and some new cartridges, and the support for loading your own cartridge from SD (of certain types only). Although the freezer problem has been addressed, it could be, that there are still issues with it. But then, it has improved, so it's good. Fortunately I have been able to answer my mails a bit faster again.. so feel free to write me with questions.. UPDATE 21th: The current ethernet batch is sold out completely. If you order now, you won't receive your board any time sooner than early august. And note: This is just an estimate! There will be only a SMALL batch. When the batch is full, I will close the order form. UPDATE July 10: Work on the project was suspended for a somewhat over a week, due to a short trip to Los Angeles. My little daughter is there for some months because my ex took her there, and I just needed to see her. Anyway, I am back now, the weather is terrible, so I will be processing payments and shippings tomorrow and try to finish 1.7 on sunday. Geez, jetlag is still killing me! :( |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 10 July 2009 16:59 )
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Introduction to the 1541 Ultimate Project What is it?The '1541 Ultimate' is a storage solution for your Commodore home computer, such as the C64, C128, C plus4, C16, etc. This piece of hardware implements a 'real' 1541 diskdrive for Commodore computers, and is capable of storing the floppy disks on a modern SD-card, or MMC-card. It contains a replica of all the necessary hardware to be fully compatible with a real drive. The '1541 Ultimate' can be used as a cartridge in the C64/C128, or as a stand-alone unit for use with other Commodore models with a serial bus. In cartridge mode, the user can view the SD-card content with just a simple push on one of the buttons, and 'mount' .d64 images into the floppy drive. In stand-alone mode, the user can use the buttons to navigate through the directories, or send IEC commands to a secondary device on the bus. This secondary device also allows saving and loading files to the FAT file system directly, but is not as compatible as the 1541 drive. ContextThe '1541 Ultimate' is a personal hobby project, that has grown into a mature device that can be very useful for current Commodore users. It enables the user to copy real 5.25" floppy disks onto an SD-card, and run them from there, without the C64 knowing that it is not a real drive it is talking to. Floppy disks are prone to aging, and many floppies are on the verge of getting unreadable. So in the context of the greater "Preservation Project" that is carried out by Commodore enthousiasts, the '1541 Ultimate' can do a lot of useful work. Although I am not a company, I would like to make the '1541 Ultimate' hardware available for Commodore enthousiasts, especially because this piece of hardware is very powerful and can potentially do a lot more than 'just' implementing a replacement for the 1541 drive. I hope that people can understand that although this board has been made with a lot of care and enthusiasm, it is still a hobby project and not an official retail product. 
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Open sourced!!The software part of the 1541 Ultimate is from now on Open Source! Although the hardware still needs to be documented, people can already check out the source code, edit it and build new applications for the 1541 Ultimate! The source is released under GPL 3.0, which in short means that every addition to the source code will also need to be open sourced and the code or parts thereof may not be sold. The full license agreement can be found in the 'root' (trunk) of the SVN archive. In order to build the software, you need to do the following: - Install Cygwin, or run under Linux. Make sure you have:
- GNU make in order to run the makefiles.
- GCC compiler, in order to build the conversion tools.
- Install CC65 (http://www.cc65.org), and make sure you have the required environment variables and path set.
- Install a SVN client package (either command line in Cygwin) or a graphical client such as Tortoise SVN.
- Check out the repository from http://svn.xp-dev.com/svn/gideonz_1541Ultimate/
- Go to the trunk directory and type 'make'.
At this point, the archive is read-only. If you are a developer and want to make a significant contribution to the 1541 Ultimate, please contact me and we can discuss being a write-user on the archive. Bug fixes from others can be E-mailed as patches, which I'd happily merge with the archive. Happy programming! |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 04 February 2009 12:37 )
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