• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

ZoomFloppy / OpenCBM/ 2031LP and 8050

D

dhoelzer

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 20, 2012
Messages
523
Location
New York
Hey there!

As I continue working my way through my PET gear, I've turned my attention to the 2031LP and the 8050 drives. There's definitely something up in my PET and I'm awaiting 3446 chips. In the meantime, I hooked an edge connector up to my ZoomFloppy to give it a GPIB interface.

Does anyone have any experience using a ZoomFloppy to talk to a 2031 or an 8050? I've got the ZoomFloppy talking to cbmctrl... I've updated the firmware to the latest (v8 ). Neither drive seems to respond to a status or detect query, though both of them react to a reset... I was thinking I wired my interface backwards except that the reset works.

Any thoughts?
 
Last edited:
What OS are you using? And do you own a 1541 drive? I had the weird experience that under Windows 7 I was able to read and write floppies with the 1541 but things didn't work for my 8250LP. Never found out the reason.
 
dhoelzer said:
Does anyone have any experience using a ZoomFloppy to talk to a 2031 or an 8050?
Click to expand...

I thought they got the 8050 interface working. However I have a 4040 drive and ZoomFloppy does not work with it. It seems they put very little effort into the software debug of ZoomFloppy with the IEEE-488 drives.
 
Ruud said:
What OS are you using? And do you own a 1541 drive? I had the weird experience that under Windows 7 I was able to read and write floppies with the 1541 but things didn't work for my 8250LP. Never found out the reason.
Click to expand...

Not currently, but it works fine with my internal 1571 on the 128DCR. Obviously, that's serial GPIB rather than parallel GPIB.

I was originally working from Windows, but had to switch over to MacOS in order to compile OpenCBM from source to support the v8 zoomfloppy firmware.
 
dave_m said:
I thought they got the 8050 interface working. However I have a 4040 drive and ZoomFloppy does not work with it. It seems they put very little effort into the software debug of ZoomFloppy with the IEEE-488 drives.
Click to expand...

Yes, I saw that. Actually, that's why I updated to the v8 firmware over v7, which required recompiling; none of the released opencbm installs include support for it.
 
Hi I am jumping in this midpoint. Are you saying the zoomfloppy does NOT read/write to the 8050 floppy drive unit? I have not tried to connect my 8050 to the zoomfloppy unit yet. I did try it with my SFD-1001 which is also a commodore ieee488 floppy and could not get it to actually write a disk.
 
VERAULT said:
Hi I am jumping in this midpoint. Are you saying the zoomfloppy does NOT read/write to the 8050 floppy drive unit? I have not tried to connect my 8050 to the zoomfloppy unit yet. I did try it with my SFD-1001 which is also a commodore ieee488 floppy and could not get it to actually write a disk.
Click to expand...

I am saying that... and I'm trying to figure out if it's the drive, my wiring, or something else. :) . It doesn't write to my 2031LP either, but both are supported.

Again, cbmctrl reset will trigger either drive if it's connected, but nothing else works *at all*
 
I have a 2031 (not the LP version) and didn't have much luck using ZoomFloppy with it, but to be fair I didn't spend a lot of time on it.
Since I have a good 1541, I just use that. The 2031 is fully read/write compatible with the 1541 so the disks are interchangeable.
 
dhoelzer said:
It doesn't write to my 2031LP either, but both are supported.
Click to expand...
IMHO if it is able to communicate with one IEEE drive, it should work for all IEEE drives. I have a small project, CBM-PC, where a PC emulates more or less a CBM. It is meant to create disk images by asking the drive to send the content of every sector of the inserted disk. I need to know what type of drive is attached because the number of tracks and sectors/track can differ. But I am using the same protocol for all the drives.

So I think you ran into the same problem I had: not being able to communicate with any IEEE drive. So far nobody found the reason or came with a solution.
 
Here is my experience. Windows 10 or MacOS 10.13 zoomfloppy v7

1541, 1541–II work fine in all regards.
1581, 8050 work only if disk was formatted first (connect drive to your PET, c64, etc... and format). In other words I can write good disks from openCBM but it cannot format them. Use a c= to format first.
 
dhoelzer said:
I am saying that... and I'm trying to figure out if it's the drive, my wiring, or something else. :) . It doesn't write to my 2031LP either, but both are supported.

Again, cbmctrl reset will trigger either drive if it's connected, but nothing else works *at all*
Click to expand...

That screams "wrong device number"!
 
Maybe I missed the point, but this topic was discussed at length around a year ago on both cbm-hackers and the zoomfloppy yahoo group. IIRC, the 2031 has subtlety different interface which didn't work with the last official firmware. All other IEEE drives worked just fine and have done for some years. It was eventually tracked down and fixed, but I'm not sure it was ever merged into the latest official firmware.

http://www.softwolves.com/arkiv/cbm-hackers/24/index.html#24238

The last time I tried to update to the v8 firmware, there was not a precompiled build of the v8 tools available and I setting up a build environment on my old laptop went beyond my willpower.
 
crock said:
Maybe I missed the point, but this topic was discussed at length around a year ago on both cbm-hackers and the zoomfloppy yahoo group. IIRC, the 2031 has subtlety different interface which didn't work with the last official firmware. All other IEEE drives worked just fine and have done for some years. It was eventually tracked down and fixed, but I'm not sure it was ever merged into the latest official firmware.

http://www.softwolves.com/arkiv/cbm-hackers/24/index.html#24238

The last time I tried to update to the v8 firmware, there was not a precompiled build of the v8 tools available and I setting up a build environment on my old laptop went beyond my willpower.
Click to expand...

Thanks . I went down that path but still have no success with the 2031LP or the 8050. :(
 
crock said:
the 2031 has subtlety different interface which didn't work with the last official firmware. All other IEEE drives worked just fine and have done for some years.
Click to expand...

ZoomFloppy still does not work with a 4040 IEEE Drive. As I remember it did a Reset, and a Directory, but wouldn't copy a file or perform a disk image copy. I have to copy individual files using ZoomFloppy from the PC to a 1541 drive and then sneaker-net the floppy to a 4040 drive, LOAD the file into PET memory, and then SAVE the program to a properly formatted 4040 floppy.

Jim Brain was willing to debug the code to get a 4040 drive to work, but could not get access to a 4040 drive.

Correction: Looking at the ZoomFloppy Google Groups messages, I found a thread I started in July 29, 2018 where I found that I could write a file to the 4040 using the CBMXfer program. I could transfer single files only not image files. The d64copy program does not work at all with the 4040.
 
Last edited:
dave_m said:
ZoomFloppy still does not work with a 4040 IEEE Drive. As I remember it did a Reset, and a Directory, but wouldn't copy a file or perform a disk image copy. I have to copy individual files using ZoomFloppy from the PC to a 1541 drive and then sneaker-net the floppy to a 4040 drive, LOAD the file into PET memory, and then SAVE the program to a properly formatted 4040 floppy.

Jim Brain was willing to debug the code to get a 4040 drive to work, but could not get access to a 4040 drive.

Correction: Looking at the ZoomFloppy Google Groups messages, I found a thread I started in July 29, 2018 where I found that I could write a file to the 4040 using the CBMXfer program. I could transfer single files only not image files. The d64copy program does not work at all with the 4040.
Click to expand...

Well, that's annoying...

Pretty sure I had used all the opencbm functions with a 4040 in the past as I had done extensive restorations on many of them some years ago, but indeed the imgcopy.exe in latest build of CBM tools does appear to be broken. As far as I can tell, all the other tools work OK.
 
crock said:
...but indeed the imgcopy.exe in latest build of CBM tools does appear to be broken. As far as I can tell, all the other tools work OK.
Click to expand...

Thanks for checking. It's a shame as I have the Toronto Pet Users Group library CD which has hundreds of Commodore computer programs that are packaged in .d64 image files. :(
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top