Commodore 1541 disk drive

[regedit]

Anyone got one of these in Thailand ?

Unboxed mine after 30 years and won't complete start sequence. No idea how to fix.

Looking for a way to access floppies (and ideally move to an SD card).

[swampdonkey]

Contact Lord Sugar on Twitter he should have some spares in his garage

[Crossy]

Contact Lord Sugar on Twitter he should have some spares in his garage

Did Amstrad acquire Commodore?

With something that old you're looking at a museum.

I doubt you're going to find a machine that can read the disks, let alone also access a CF card.

What's on the disks??

For those too young to have any idea what we're on about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541

[Pib]

I use to have one back in the 80's, but I doubt that helps. Mine lasted a year or so before needing to go to the shop for realignment. I'm surprised after 30 years it would even spin up...I expect the capacitors on the circuit board have long dried up...and even the spindle motor bearing is dried up. And I think they had a drive belt also which would probably be rotten/dried up.

[harrry]

alignment on those is a simple screw adjustment but you would need someone who knew what they are doing with that, which would be hard here.

speed is an adjustment using a paper disk marked with strobe lines from memory again a simple screw,

[harrry]

I presume you are using a commodore 64 as an emulator will not interwace with these.

[Pib]

alignment on those is a simple screw adjustment but you would need someone who knew what they are doing with that, which would be hard here.

speed is an adjustment using a paper disk marked with strobe lines from memory again a simple screw,

A young airman who worked for me when I was in the military had a part time job repairing computers...actually he had a computer repair side business and his wife helped out. I remember one weekend going to his home and there his wife was aligning a Commodore 1541 drive with their 6 month old baby setting on her knee. How they did the alignment was with a special alignment disc and an oscilloscope probe hooked to a point on the circuit board...view the signal on the O-scope and make an adjustment to accomplish the alignment. If I remember right they made an adjustment to where a small spike would appear in the middle of a pulse so many milliseconds wide...make this adjustment for the inside and outer tracks. She said it normally takes about 5 minutes to complete an alignment.

[alocacoc]

Contact Lord Sugar on Twitter he should have some spares in his garage

Did Amstrad acquire Commodore?

I guess not. But my first Home computer was a Amstrad CPC6128. Loved it.

[IMHO]

Did Amstrad acquire Commodore?

CBM went out of business all by themselves. Apparently one of their USA execs took over the rights, sold them, and they sold again. I've seen two different reboot attempts that never made it to actual market.

[sniffdog]

Ah ... Such memories ... Upgrading from cassette to the 1541 .. Such an world of improvement.

[delta7]

I can't help with the disk drive but if you are only trying to access old games / demos etc then images of most things can be found on the internet if you look around.

You can then load the images using one of these:

http://www.1541ultimate.net/

or

https://www.thefuturewas8bit.com/index.php/sd2iec-info

[harrry]

Actually it was quite possible and more general to use a normal incandescent light to realign the disk using the strobe markings for 50 or 60 hz. a fairly dark room except for the one light bulb helped.

[harrry]

When I returned to Australia from Turkey many years ago I had one, a disc drive converted to parrallel, a solid state ram drive, a speech emulator and a box of 200 discs filled with programs. Piracy was little known there then:)

[Daffy D]

Actually it was quite possible and more general to use a normal incandescent light to realign the disk using the strobe markings for 50 or 60 hz. a fairly dark room except for the one light bulb helped.

Yes that works in the real world that has a stable power supply

[Lannig]

Love such discussion about old iron like this

Never had this particular machine myself athough that's quite my "era" of personal computing hobbyist youngster (which later turned out to become my job)

I remember messing with 5 1/4 floppy disc seek timings to speed them up, poking values in the binaries of the disc O/S (Flex 6800)

[lopburi3]

Those of us on a more modest budget just had the tape drive - and typed programs into the computer from magazines.

In 1983 lost one of these tape drives to home invaders in Conakry - am sure they never figured out why they could not play there music tapes.

Edited April 29, 2016 by lopburi3

[bino]

Those of us on a more modest budget just had the tape drive - and typed programs into the computer from magazines.

In 1983 lost one of these tape drives to home invaders in Conakry - am sure they never figured out why they could not play there music tapes.

That was me. disk drive cost silly money back then!

[sniffdog]

Ran my first bbs on a c64. I think 1984.

[brianinbangkok]

Anyone got one of these in Thailand ?

Unboxed mine after 30 years and won't complete start sequence. No idea how to fix.

Looking for a way to access floppies (and ideally move to an SD card).

chances are if you open it up that you will find most of the capacitors need replacing if it has them. Just for starters.

[dddave]

HaHa...1541 = Bang-Bang-bang.....how those things even lasted six months is a wonder. Yes...typing pages of code from "Compute Gazette"...then days of debugging trying to find the period you entered instead of a comma, that tape drive took an eternity to load anything...then there was the 1200 baud modem.

Jack Tramiel, the late Commodore founder and insane micromanager was a true crazed genius who, had he not been such a notorious tightwad could have surpassed Bill Gates and Steven Jobs.

Someday, when you're bored, Google him. There was some really interesting stuff that came out after he died in 2013.

[regedit]

It's nice and clean on the inside.

Been reading many posts out there and seems to be a common problem if not used for years, but the troubleshooting needs to be done by someone who understands electronics (or has the time to learn...)

Looks like I'll be unboxing the tape deck next...