Commander X16

I ask, because I'm looking at projects such as https://github.com/pi1541/Pi1541 as one possible bridge to the X16.

 

This might be interesting for some of us:

 

Yes, there are more polished versions from established manufacturers out there, but I like that this one uses a (replaceable) MicroSD card and the antenna would be outside the (probably metal) case of the X16. Also, the firmware is open source.

10 hours ago, Fnord42 said:

Yes, there are more polished versions from established manufacturers out there, but I like that this one uses a (replaceable) MicroSD card and the antenna would be outside the (probably metal) case of the X16. Also, the firmware is open source.

Looks like a nice solution to back up your work on X16 without removing SD card. I might actually use it. Thank you for sharing!

On 1/22/2021 at 10:18 AM, Fnord42 said:

This might be interesting for some of us:  [video in orignal reply]



Yes, there are more polished versions from established manufacturers out there, but I like that this one uses a (replaceable) MicroSD card and the antenna would be outside the (probably metal) case of the X16. Also, the firmware is open source.

That would be just about a perfect solution to quickly get files onto the X16, without a lot of hassle (if it works as advertised).  Yeah, I know it doesn't seem like a big deal, but I'm picturing a newly purchased X16 without any peripherals purchased yet, on a desk, monitor on top, desk lamp to one side, a potted plant on the other, a mug of your favorite liquid, and having to reach back and blindly insert and remove the sd card, without knocking any of that other stuff over, when you want to transfer files.   That gets old fast.  Yeah yeah, the case could be located differently, but the design just begs to be a monitor stand ?

This could possibly work as well:  https://www.amazon.com/Standard-Memory-Female-Extension-Extender/dp/B01LX7VE4M/

On 2/8/2021 at 2:17 AM, x16tial said:

That would be just about a perfect solution to quickly get files onto the X16, without a lot of hassle (if it works as advertised).  Yeah, I know it doesn't seem like a big deal, but I'm picturing a newly purchased X16 without any peripherals purchased yet, on a desk, monitor on top, desk lamp to one side, a potted plant on the other, a mug of your favorite liquid, and having to reach back and blindly insert and remove the sd card, without knocking any of that other stuff over, when you want to transfer files.   That gets old fast.  Yeah yeah, the case could be located differently, but the design just begs to be a monitor stand ?



This could possibly work as well:  https://www.amazon.com/Standard-Memory-Female-Extension-Extender/dp/B01LX7VE4M/

Every time someone publishes an update to their fun game, especially if it assumes device 1, we’re going to have to touch that SD card.  GitHub allows me to update my code every day.  Fun games will be improved daily too.  I am just going to assume frequent updates... call it 256 updates per year.  The less we unplug that card and plug it back in, the better.

9k/s is better than any floppy drives from the 8-bit era.

 

There are SD cards that include WiFi.  It might take some fancy programming to make it work, but once it does the SD card becomes both mass storage and a communications device.

On 3/19/2021 at 1:43 PM, Ed Minchau said:

There are SD cards that include WiFi.  It might take some fancy programming to make it work, but once it does the SD card becomes both mass storage and a communications device.

Yes, and also, as was posted 4 posts above this one, back on Jan 23, by @Fnord42 there are <$10 SD boards that have a built in WiFi and micro-SD slot, which gives around 125KBps, which makes 67MB of files around 10 minutes, but with the CX16 side just accessing the files from the SD card slot. There was some bugginess reported in that review, but as long as the individual files are less than 20MB, that avoids the limit on file size handled by the microcontroller in the WiFi module.

Note that it is mentioned in the youtube that some of the bugginess may be due to the power actually available at the SD port ... if the CX16 has SDIO level power available at the SD port, and not just "this seems to be enough to work with (most) SD cards", those issues might go away.

Definitely something worth exploring when there are actual CX16 boards available to test them on.

So here's my Fast IEC + SD2IEC thread.

 

Michael Steil did a video on C64-to-1541 optimizations. 

He puts an absolute speed threshold between the C64 and 1541 at 7.5 Kb per second.  This assumes using a real 1541 -- which has multiple bottleneck problems -- and old illegal 6502 opcodes that I think are removed in modern 6502s.

 

1. THE X16 IS NOT A C64

The nice thing about the X16 is that we can to some degree dictate the flavor of IEC that we support.

 

2. THE IEC PROTOCOL IS "DOMINATED" BY SD2IEC

The less-nice thing about the IEC protocol is that THE go-to device is the SD2IEC, so we are tied to its limitations if we expect any sort of plug-and-play accessibility for the X16.

Put another way: custom solutions suffer from availability bottlenecks.

 

3. POTENTIAL SOLUTION BASED ON PI1541

That said, the PI1541 is open-source and cycle-exact.  A smart fellow could potentially gut the cycle-exact bits and produce a "fast" PI IEC device.

It would have to be something like a PI because of pre-covid availability.  Granted today everything is hard to get, but that will abate.

 

The good news is that even though little work has been done on testing the IEC functionality, on the X16 side it is purely a software issue.  So in theory the various fast loader techniques can all be supported. But yes, since the SD2IEC doesn’t really support running custom code it is the more limited option.