A Day with Star Commander

[Jeff-20]

Today I finally did it. I took my XE1541 and my XA1541, and I went thru every possible configuration of Star Commander. I used both cables, all printer port modes (EPP, ECP, normal), all speeds (warp, turbo, normal), etc. etc. No results.

So, I finally tried GUI4CBM4WIN. Worked on the first try. Nice GUI too! (If I see Leif at ECCC, I'm gonna bear hug him). So, anyway, I finally have transfer abilities again. That means I have a big back log of games to dump on you poor folks.

For someone who doesn't like to see his work on emulators, it is somewhat of a mixed bag. I am happy to down load a ton of projects onto my real hardware, but I hate to think that anything I upload will probably only be played on emulators.

How often do you guys take downloads to real hardware? How great is the difference between emulator to hardware when you run programs?

[Bacon]

I always transfer to my real machine. Haven't much thougt about the differences other than that xvic has the wrong aspect ratio and much too sharp a picture

[Jeff-20]

I just spent the last few hours playing all of the games I've been dying to play on a real machine! Jewels, Pong, Tetris Alternate, Sodoku, Boray's Boing, even the Multi-cart software (with the cursive writing!). What a night! I had soooo much fun. I'm humbled by what is possible with our little VIC. I'll have to reconsider all of the games I made this year.

[Schema]

(If I see Leif at ECCC, I'm gonna bear hug him).

Duly warned!

How often do you guys take downloads to real hardware? How great is the difference between emulator to hardware when you run programs?

Re the emulator issue. It's a trade-off - While real hardware is the best, is it better that your games be played on an emulator, or not at all?

As for myself, I usually get games in PRG or D64 format so I quickly load them up in VICE just to do a quick test run. Then I transfer them over to a disk to use on the real thing.

[PaulQ]

I tend to prefer the real thing to an emulator. I started emulating other computers on my Amiga. I'd emulate an Atari ST, then I'd want one. I emulated a PC, then I wanted one. Heck, even when I started emulating the Commodore 64 on my Amiga 500, I wanted my C64 back.

An emulator is nice if you want to go for a walk down memory lane and can't find the original hardware anymore; however, at least to me, there was more to these computers than their BASIC. It's the feel of that classic Commodore keyboard, with a shift lock that clicks down; it's the feel of the rocker switch as you power it on; it's the feel of sliding the joystick into joystick port 1, or the modem into the user port. You can't emulate the feel of pressing play on tape, or slipping a slick black 5.25" disk into a 1541 drive and closing the door. The feel provides a very nice context in which to place things.

[ral-clan]

DigitalQuirk summed up my feelings too. Real thing for me. Emulators to test games on, then real VIC-20 to actually play them on.

[hawk]

I'm also with DigitalQuirk. I like the whole experience of the real thing...right down to the load times from tape (although this limits the number of games one gets to try ). I'm one of those crazy people that purchased a copy of the VIC-20 games from Cronosoft, just so that I could have a physical copy of the games.

But I've not had a great setup for transferring software, and I'm interested to know whether anyone has got GUI4CBM4WIN working under Win98? I know it's an old OS, but my PC in the workshop just isn't up to running anything newer. (Celeron 500, 64Mb RAM)

I can run Star Commander if I boot into DOS, but this is very inconvienient, as that requires me to get my networking working under DOS, as my files live on my machine in the house. (I'm trying to cut down on having multiple copies of everything all over the place.) And I've found that running Star Commander from Win98 can lock the machine. It works fine on my 486, but I don't want to have yet another PC setup...it takes a spot away from where I can setup a retro machine.

Anyway, once again, has anyone got GUI4CBM4WIN working under Win98?

If I pulled my finger out and built my mmc2iec, this wouldn't be a problem! Although then my retro experience would be somewhat lessened.

I get a kick out of seeing something that I've developed on the PC using cross-compilers running on the real hardware as an assembly program. And there's something about making fancy graphics appear on the VIC-20 screen that I don't get from a PC, with all it's capabilities.

[paytonbyrd]

I don't believe that OpenCBM (which is what GUI4CBM4WIN is built on) is compatible with the original Windows 98 since OpenCBM compiles to Windows 2000 style device drivers. You may be able to get it working with Windows 98 Second Edition since it uses WDM drivers, but that's still iffy.

You'll need to decide if you really need Windows 98 or if you would be better off with Windows XP. You indicated you are running Windows 98 on a network which is phenomenally risky considering Microsoft stopped releasing security patches for Windows 98 years ago (you wouldn't want to be running a 10 year old version of Linux either). If you are willing to upgrade to XP, or dual-boot with XP then you can use GUI4CBM4WIN, still have networking, and also keep up-to-date on security patches.

[Jeff-20]

It worked fine yesterday, but today I get:

RUNTIME ERROR 70: Permission Denied

Whenever I attempt to detect the drive. I've tried rebooting and reseting the bus. What a strange error. I'm not complaining. As long as it works. I just had to reset the bus a few times before I got drive detection.

Word.

[paytonbyrd]

Try the newest version; what you are describing is one of many bugs in GUI4CBM4WIN 0.4.0 and older that were centered around the fact that the VB6 version would capture the output of OpenCBM into a temporary text file. I've made many upgrades to GUI4CBM4WIN, not least of which is properly spawning OpenCBM into a child thread and capturing stdout directly. You will need to have the .Net Framework 2.0 installed to use my version of GUI4CBM4WIN.

[hawk]

Thanks for the feedback Payton. It took me quite a lot of playing with parallel ports and setting before I realized that OpenCBM wasn't working because I was using Win98SE.

My machine in the workshop just doesn't have the grunt to install XP. I've yet to try it on my XP machine in the house though. I guess I could do the transfers in the house, and take the disks out to the workshop. I might have to try that.

The other option I'm looking at is trying to get an old 486 laptop that I can use for transfers that won't take up too much desk space. Then I'd just use Star Commander running in DOS.

Or maybe I can pickup a cheap KVM that will allow me to run a 486 desktop using my existing peripherals. That seems like a viable option.

Just out of interest, does anyone use 64HDD with a VIC-20?

[Alan]

Just out of interest, does anyone use 64HDD with a VIC-20?

Yes, I use 64HDD 100% of the time with my VIC. Works great. Software loads at 1540 speeds, but that's usually not an issue with VIC stuff since it's so small.

If you have the Pro version of 64HDD and the Pwr-Load cable, the loading speed is improved dramatically. I have a ton of 16K cartridge games and they load pretty much instantly.

I bought 64HDD Pro years ago and have used it with all my C= computers. It's hands-down the best investment I ever made in Commodore equipment.

[Schlowski]

I'm using 64HDD too, it's really nice and easy. And since it uses the standard PC file system it's very conveniant for testing downloaded software. No hassle with the 1541, X... cables and so on, just copying the files into the virtual drive directory like in VICE

[Ghislain]

duplicate removed

[Ghislain]

I lost my previous X1541 cable, so I bought another from eBay a few weeks ago. Since I use Linux, I created a FreeDOS live CD so I can transfer programs in StarCommander again. I have a computer room with my Intel-based PC (with a 1541 drive connected to it) and my VIC-20/C64 is set up in the guest bedroom with their own 1541 drive.