How the heck does one order one of these things? Going to their website, I must be totally blind because I can't find anywhere to actually order it.  Am I missing something?  Im going to www.ide64.org

Email him directly (it's what I did).

cheers,

Lance

Be forewarned, the older version of the IDE64 is no longer available and the new version (4.0) hasn't been released yet. In a nutshell, you can't get an IDE64 right now unless you buy it second hand. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Quote from: xlar54(from comp.sys.cbm)
If nothing else... it would be nice for something like Virtual PC or
VMWare to take full control of the parallel port so you could run 64HDD
in a DOS window without problems.  Anyone tried this?

Sorry to pull this from Usenet, but since this other post of yours is sort of related, I thought I'd comment here.

While I don't have exact experience with this, I have used VirtualPC to control several devices via parallel port, including a printer, a scanner and a Zip drive. None of the devices had drivers on the host operating system, so they were being controlled through the emulated OS interfacing with the parallel port, and all worked flawlessly for me. I was a little concerned at first when trying out the Zip drive, fearful that I might end up with corruption when writing to disk, but never had any problems. So it seems there's at least some chance that 64HDD might work, too. Assuming you already have a cable, you can try both 64HDD and VirtualPC for free and see what happens.

Quote from: nikoniko

Quote from: xlar54(from comp.sys.cbm)
If nothing else... it would be nice for something like Virtual PC or
VMWare to take full control of the parallel port so you could run 64HDD
in a DOS window without problems.  Anyone tried this?

Sorry to pull this from Usenet, but since this other post of yours is sort of related, I thought I'd comment here.

While I don't have exact experience with this, I have used VirtualPC to control several devices via parallel port, including a printer, a scanner and a Zip drive. None of the devices had drivers on the host operating system, so they were being controlled through the emulated OS interfacing with the parallel port, and all worked flawlessly for me. I was a little concerned at first when trying out the Zip drive, fearful that I might end up with corruption when writing to disk, but never had any problems. So it seems there's at least some chance that 64HDD might work, too. Assuming you already have a cable, you can try both 64HDD and VirtualPC for free and see what happens.

It's been tried (by me and others) and it doesn't work.  Sorry to say it, but you simply can't get around the fact that when you take CPU cycles away from 64HDD it simply breaks the IEC protocol timing.  The ZIP drive was designed with multi-tasking operating systems in mind and as such is going to work just fine in this scenario.  The IEC bus is a different beast altogether and is not at all tolerant of missed timings.

That's too bad. I had forgotten that IEC bases its handshake and EOI entirely on timing, so now I can see that not having real-time control would be disasterous. The PC has a long time to respond to the initial ready to send signal, but once the main exchange begins then only a small fraction of a second delay would cause the C64 to register EOI and stop the transmission prematurely.

Ah well. Despite what some might think, there's still a lot of use for DOS yet, eh?

Quote from: nikonikoThat's too bad. I had forgotten that IEC bases its handshake and EOI entirely on timing, so now I can see that not having real-time control would be disasterous. The PC has a long time to respond to the initial ready to send signal, but once the main exchange begins then only a small fraction of a second delay would cause the C64 to register EOI and stop the transmission prematurely.

Ah well. Despite what some might think, there's still a lot of use for DOS yet, eh?

Well, at least until someone finally comes up with a micro-controller solution for IEC that can be used to handle all the IEC protocol nastiness and then allow a hardware developer to focus on an interface that actually works from the PC side in multitasking operating systems.  There are rumblings about a project that will do just this and has the potential to lead to a true asynchronous interface for IEC devices, including the computers, not just the drives.  

Aside from the micro-controller solution I've heard rumors of C-One based solution that would have a core that is a dedicated drive server, complete with ROMs from real drives and true 6502 circuitry so the timings are factory spec perfect.  At this point I think this is by far the best use of the C-One and I am anxiously awaiting such a core to appear because then all of the I/O options of the C-One become available through the standard IEC protocol and one should be able to get near 100% compatibility with all the Commodore drives.

I hope one or both of those come through.

UPDATE: Just came across Golan's post about the 1541 "Ultimate" project over on the PETSCII forums. It's another FPGA effort, and I like that they plan to implement this as a C64 cartridge with SD card support. When you need to change to a different .D64 image, you press a button on the cartridge to pause the C64 and select a disk from an onscreen menu. They also want to have something like Final Cartridge III built-in. Upgrading the emulation would be as simple as copying updates onto the SD card. Additionally, they plan to offer a stand-alone version as well, though they'll have to figure out how to enable the user to select a disk image without a menu.