PI 1541 II Commodore disk drive simulator

Pi1541 is a real-time, cycle-accurate Commodore 1541 disk drive emulator that can run on a Raspberry Pi 3B, 3B+, 3A+ and ZERO.

In conjunction with an rpiZERO, Pi1541 provides you with an SD card solution to use Commodore D64, D81, G64, NIB and NBZ disk images on real Commodore 8-bit computers such as:

• Commodore 64
• Commodore 128
• Commodore Vic20
• Commodore 16
• Commodore Plus4

The Commodore 1541 disk drive is a computer in itself. It consists of a CPU, ROM, RAM, IO devices and the mechanics of the drive. Due to the popularity of Commodore machines and the subsequent proliferation of software created for them, all sorts of exotic fast loaders and copy protection schemes were developed. As a result, a cheap, cycle-accurate SD card solution has been slower than other systems to arrive.

What does PI-1541-2 include?

• Pi-1541-2
• DIN connection cable

The RpiZERO is not included

How does the Pi1541 differ from the SD2IEC?

Unlike SD2IECPi1541 emulates a 6502 and the two 6522s. Any code it is asked to run is executed in a cycle-accurate manner. SD2IEC supports a limited set of fast loaders by trying to guess the fast loader from the code sent to it. SD2IEC will not and cannot execute the code, it only simulates the communication protocols. As a result, only a small number of popular fast loaders are supported. As the Pi1541 can run code on its emulated 6502 core, it supports a wide range of fast loaders (games and demo scenes), including copy-protected originals.

PRI configuration

To use the Pi1541 you will need a Raspberry Pi 3B (or 3B+), an SD card, a cable, the free Raspberry Pi Foundation firmware and a valid Commodore 1541 ROM file.
The cable was designed to be as simple and cheap as possible.

SD CARD CONFIGURATION

1. Format an SD card to Fat32. It is best to use an SD card of 32GB or less.
2. Unzip the zip file provided (Pizero123.zip(This will create a folder called 1541 in the root folder of the SD card. This is where you can place the images and folders from your Commodore disk).
3. Copy a file containing a 1541 ROM image (e.g. vice-3.1DRIVES1541) to the root folder of the SD card. The ROM should be named dos1541 or d1541.rom or d1541II or Jiffy.bin.
4. Copy the images and folders from your disk to the 1541 folder now on the SD card.