My horribly old #desktop #PC is finally starting to die. Currently running a backup (using #zfs send/recv) to my server of one important local dataset.

Now I started looking for new hardware and to my surprise found a "modern" mainboard with a "real" parallel port (internal header, certainly good enough). This really helps with my retro hobby (#C64), years ago I soldered a simple interface cable that allows using a 1541 floppy on the PC, I even ported the #opencbm driver for that from #Linux to #FreeBSD. Without a parallel port, you'd need some complex USB interface instead including a microcontroller and "tons of shit", while the cable for the parallel port basically consists of a few diodes.

Now I wonder one thing: I'd also love to have a #FDC (#floppy drive controller) again. Is there any modern board coming with THAT as well or should I just forget about it?

After a hiatus from this project, I made some progress with porting a subset of OpenCBM to rust.

Basic XUM device communication over USB and exchange of simple commands with the XUM device appears to be working.

The #ZoomFloppy interface works very good with the #Vice emulator. Many thanks to the #OpenCBM team for fixing the recent issues I had. #Commodore64 #retrocomputing

Wanted to do some stuff with my ZoomFloppy but after becoming partial to Rust, I really, really don't want to do it in C++.

So I've started to port a subset of OpenCBM from C++ to Rust. Only targeting XUM1541 support - for now anyway.

The heavy USB lifting is done by rusb which presents a nice Rust interface to the behemoth that is libusb.

We'll see where this goes, but some good progress getting as far as initializing the device, querying its state and executing a Reset to the connected drive, over the IEC bus.

New video up for Patreons:

ZoomFloppy+OpenCBM+8050

The main issue with the Commodore 8050 and 8250 drives is: How do you get data onto them?

https://www.patreon.com/posts/zoomfloppy-8050-93771295

Testing out the ZoomFloppy… it is really plug and play in combination with OpenCBM.
#commodore #c64 #opencbm #zoomfloppy #retrocomputing