Jason Streetz

 What makes me want to forsake the silly sophistry of virtual machines, virtual memory, and virtual hyperthreaded processors to retreat into the abundant promise of simple, real, bit-shiftin', bank-flippin', disk-swappin', SID-swingin', joystick-grabbin' solidity?

Before the first x86, before C++, device drivers, memory management, kernal mode, and databases were household terms, there was...


... and it was good.

Commodore on the PocketPC

Yeah, I carry the C= around with me. Great for boring meetings or family functions.

You can get a copy from clickgamer.com.

My Commodore SX-64 (& Its Companion Laptop)

In early 2006, I got my hands a Commodore SX-64 in very near mint condition. Suddenly I found myself with a self-contained Commodore computer: monitor, disk drive, cpu and keyboard. Now I didn't need to unbox my C128 or C64, untangle and plug-in all those cables, and/or find a monitor or TV nearby in order to play with a Commodore!

And while an SX-64 by itself is cool enough on its own, I had a few X-cables laying around, and a spare laptop or three, so an idea formed quickly.

The SX-64 Itself

Pure and simple, a machine to be marvelled.

Hacking together the companion laptop

I wanted the laptop to serve two purposes. One, to be able to read and write to real Commodore 15x1 floppy drives. Two, to act as a storage medium for the SX-64 (or any other C= computer, for that matter). Both of these were possible with the right combination of X-cable and software.

But I also wanted the laptop to serve as a network-capable Windows PC, so I could easily treat it as just another node on my LAN of PCs. That, and although much of the Commodore-to-PC software requires DOS, there's an equal share of utility programs that require (or run more conveniently on) Windows.

So, I picked Windows ME as the operating system mainly because it was the most modern Windows OS that still supported booting to real-mode DOS (ie, not DOS in a window like nowadays' Windows).

But actually, to get Windows ME to optionally boot to DOS, you need to apply a hack/patch that opens this up, because Microsoft hid/disabled this ability for whatever reason (it was openly possible under Windows 95/98, for instance). Sure, I guess I could have done the dual partition thing to get DOS and some Windows OS at boot. But I figured: If Windows ME was still a DOS flavor under the hood, why not just boot to that if I could? (That, and the laptop -- a Dell Latitude CPxH -- wasn't exactly suited to running more modern OSes anyhow; Could I have used a newer laptop? Not really, I needed one with a slower Pentium -- in this case a P3 -- and an available parallel port, a port that has long been out of style, in order to use the X-cables)

So in the end, I wound up with a hacked-together Windows ME boot menu that looked like the image to the left. (The line that is glared out is "1. Boot Windows ME")

With this, I had a laptop that could sit atop the SX-64, with its software and cables work with it, while together in their "collapsed" forms, they made a compact permanent fixture in my offce!

The Windows ME Real-Mode DOS Patch
After I applied this, it was a simple matter of tweaking config.sys and autoexec.bat to get my boot menu.

My Configuration Files

The Cables
As you can see in these pictures, I have the XM1514 and XE1514 cables ready to go for the parallel port in the back of the laptop. (Depending on which software I'm running, I might need one or the other, but, alas, there is only one port...)

And of course, there's all the usual cables run to the laptop. Keyboard, USB, network (for WinME mode) and so on.

One interesting thing I found is a driver that allows DOS mode to work with USB mass storage devices (such as memory card readers, and so on), so the SanDisk you see nearby can actually be used in any boot mode (DOS or Win). This comes in pretty handy for transferring files if I don't want to boot WinME just to get the network.

StarCommander Boot

StarCommander is very useful for transferring Commodore Disks to and from PC file formats. I've used StarCommander to archive many of my re-discovered C= disks from yesteryear. It is also useful for taking a PC-format C= disk file (say, a .D64) and writing it to a real 15x1 disk.



Notice the 1571 drive in the background, and the right-hand pane on the laptop screen: it is showing the 1571's disk contents :)

64HDD Boot

64HDD is very useful. It allows you to treat your PC as a harddisk for Commodore computers. I find this extraordinarly cool, because I can use it to run many of those D64 images I've pulled from the internet on the SX-64, loaded right from the laptop's harddrive!


In the pictures above, I'm running 64HDD and the SX-64 together, so that the laptop essentially turns into a harddisk for the SX-64. To a large extent, this is read and write capable, meaning you can save data through the C= to the PC, and the C= doesn't know much different, just as easily as you can tranparently load data to the C= from the PC. Notice on the laptop screen how you can map certain C= drive #s to specific folders on the PC (or, not pictured, specific .D64 files on the PC, in which case the C= sees the contents of that D64)!

VICE Boots (C64, C128)

I've got the laptop setup to optionally boot straight into VICE emulated C64 or C128 modes. Again, handy for playing around with things before actually running it on the real SX64 (or my real C64/C128, for when I unbox them from time to time).

Windows ME Boot

From time to time, it is useful to use the laptop as a real networkable Windows OS, to, for instance, transfer the lastest batch of D64s gotten from somewhere to or from the laptop and the rest of my network, or just to run one of the Windows-mode C= utility programs.


Notice in this picture I'm running Windows ME, and a few instances of the VICE C= emulator (this time, in Windows mode). I've also got other things loaded on there like cc65, a D64 editor, and so on. All for playing with PC-to-C= and vice-versa.