Commodore 64 question - transferring

[wclem]

I know this may sound dumb but I gotta ask. Can you download a C64 game, put it on a 5 1/4 floppy in your pc then place the floppy in you C64 and play away? Or are the 2 formats some how incompatible?

[Ivo]

Unless you get a way to get the image files into the floppy properly they should be incompatible. The files you download are disk images, so if you are familiar with .isos it is something like that.

There may be a software way to do it with a PC floppy drive, just like you can burn CDs with image files of different systems. It may be possible if there is a C64 emulator that handles the physical floppy drive of your PC and running an actual C64 disk copy program. You'd load the virtual image as a virtual drive that the emulator would recognize and then try to copy to the physical drive using the emulated copying program.

I'm sorry I can't help more.

Ivo.

[CRTGAMER]

Agree with Ivo, the disk images are "ISOs" for emulation. The C64 1541 disk drive will not be able to read them without some sort of convert program. There was a commercial C64 to PC conversion program sold back in the day that allowed a PC to read saved C64 word processor data files using the floppy drive. This proves that is possible to write non protected disk games on a PC Floppy drive using 360k floppies. If there is a program that will do the conversion that is.

[Hobie-wan]

There is a cable that can be made to hook a 1541 drive to a PC parallel port so you can read and write to C64 floppies. There is also a sort of flash device that can be used on a C64. I have only read a little about both though.

[Hatta]

The cheap way is to build an x1541 type cable and dump the disk images directly from your parallel port to a 1541 drive. You have to be handy though, and parallel port compatibility is iffy these days.

The slightly more expensive, but easier way is a ZoomFloppy. It's a USB device that serves the same function as an x1541 cable.

The even more expensive way is to get a uIEC device. With this device you can load any non fast loader disk image from SD media. Fast loader disk images you can dump to a real disk with the C64 program 'd64it'.

The much more expensive way is to get a 1541 Ultimate. This cart runs any and every D64 image from flash media on 2 emulated 1541 drives. It also acts as a ram expansion unit and freezer cart, and a lot more.

You may also be able to get a serial connection going between your PC and C64, and xmodem files over to the c64, then use d64it to dump the disk image. Of course this requires a working serial setup, communications software, and storage on the C64 side.

There's more than one way to do it. Good luck!

[wclem]

Well this was all very helpful. Except now that I fired it up to mess around with it the stupid thing has taken a dump. All I am getting is a fuzzy garbled picture and a rather annoying feedback sounds.

Now to find a working system LOL.

[Hatta]

Check out Lemon64. They can probably help you identify the fault.