Questions about my 1541 drive

[ohm]

I have tried searching but I cannot seem to find an answer. I got my 1541 disk drive today and it works pretty good, I plugged it into my desktop, only one with a parallel port, with a XM1541 cable that I made and was able to format and write four disks with no real headaches. The 4 disks I made were of the 8k games carts from 8-bit central. Anyway, plugged the drive into the vic and stuck my 16k expander card and fired it up, stuck the first disk in and got the menu so I selected choplifter, the drive sits there and chews on it for a minute and then goes back to the 19xxx bits free,ready prompt? Am I not doing something I should be doing? Also on the second disk it wouldn't run the menu program, it would load it but throw an error when you try and run it. I typed in load"frogger",8 and it brought up the loading screen for frogger but then went back to the main prompt.

Sorry if this is an obvious question.

[ohm]

I was doing some thinking and searching on the forum, might the reason the games are not running properly be because I am using a 16k expansion cart instead of an 8k? I assumed that a a 16k would be good for both. I was reading that you could take and wire dip switches, or just a single toggle to select 1 or 4, to the jumper pads inside a 16k cart to make it act like an 8k cart should I do this to make mine more usable?

[Mike]

These problems don't arise because there are any issues with your drive, but because you need to know a bit about memory configurations on the VIC ...

[...]got the menu so I selected choplifter, the drive sits there and chews on it for a minute and then goes back to the 19xxx bits free,ready prompt?

Choplifter needs RAM present at BLK5, between $A000..$BFFF. A 16K RAM expansion normally fills BLK1, and BLK2. It merely does not suffice, that there's enough memory present, it must also be located into the right place.

Am I not doing something I should be doing?

I'm afraid you'll need to make some hardware alteration to your 16K cart:

I was reading that you could take and wire dip switches, or just a single toggle to select 1 or 4, to the jumper pads inside a 16k cart to make it act like an 8k cart should I do this to make mine more usable?

Yes, by adding dip-switches (before that, open the jumper pads), you can make one 8K block still appear in BLK1, and the other in BLK5.

Then you'd still have an 8K RAM expansion for BASIC, but also can load cartridge images (like Choplifter) into BLK5.

Also on the second disk it wouldn't run the menu program, it would load it but throw an error when you try and run it. I typed in load"frogger",8 and it brought up the loading screen for frogger but then went back to the main prompt.

Maybe this version of Frogger doesn't require a RAM expansion at all. You can temporarily disable your RAM expansion thus:

Code: Select all

POKE642,16:POKE644,30:POKE648,30:SYS64818

Then try again.

Greetings,

Michael

[ohm]

Yeah I think I pretty much have it figured out, I picked up a dip switch and am going to mod the 16k cart.

[ohm]

I ended up not using the dip switch, I instead used a mini spdt slide switch to select between pins 1 and 4 on the cart and it works very well. I just have the slide switch poking out the open slot in the back of the cart so it is not very noticeable either.