Building the Pi1541

So, have you ever just wanted to solve a problem so much that you jump to a conclusion that has nothing to do with the actual problem?
I have. This is my story.

One of my favorite games growing up was a game that was published by EA just called Wizard. It was then updated to be Ultimate Wizard, which was just the same game but with 60 new levels. I’ve still never needed those 60 extra levels since I can’t finish the base 40 levels. (It’s my favorite, I’m not good at it.)
It’s a C64 game, but I’m using my C128. Because one of the few failings of the 128 is that so little software was made specifically for it. Though, as I was corrected in the comments of a recent video, it was not a commercial failure. Commodore expected to sell 450K over 1 year and ended up selling 4.5M over 5 years.

But I digress…
I couldn’t get my beloved Ultimate Wizard to load. It would always crash, and the SD2IEC would just flash errors at me. So, without hesitating, I decided that it must be because it used a custom fastloader that the SD2IEC didn’t understand. Because, what else could it be?

So to the rescue, let’s build the Pi1541! A cycle-exact replica of the 1541 disk drive. Sweet! Everything should work. I just need some parts. Luckily I have a Pi-Zero hat to build one! Except I don’t have a Pi-Zero. And there are few to be found, and I’m definitely not paying $77 and waiting 4 weeks for one. But I do have a Pi3. It’s currently my RetroPie right now though.

Guess I’m giving up one retro toy for another.

Off to eBay to get a Pi3 hat for the Pi1541. Only $35, not too bad.

Luckily I found that I had an extra micro-SD card around, so I can leave the RetroPie’s card intact for now. If I get an additional Pi3 someday I’ll put it back into service. And I will put it back into service somehow. I followed the somewhat convoluted directions across several different sites, but now it’s a very happy little device. I like how the HDMI Output of the Pi can be used to see what the drive is doing in real time. It’s a nice feature for troubleshooting. I didn’t really capture that in the video, but it was a big help in figuring out what the ultimate problem was.

It turns out that I actually had bad disk images.
That was it.
I loaded it up on the SD2IEC with a new set of disk images and…. Worked just fine. Especially with the Epyx Fastloader.

Turns out I did a lot of work to solve the wrong problem.
Am I upset? No, I wanted to build a Pi1541 for a while. I just had no reason to. Then I did, then I didn’t.

I can’t play NES and SNES games on my TV upstairs for now, but that will get rectified eventually.

I hope this was a good learning experience for someone else, it definitely was for me!