My latest purchase

[Darklight]

Hey all, just wanted to get some info on my latest purchase.  A friend of the family stopped by about an hour ago and said he had a Commodore 128 he had been given to sell, which he wanted $10 AUD for (about $5 US).  So, I immediately went over, and found a near-mint condition Commodore 128D, still in box, with all attachments, genuine Commodore tape drive, a bunch of boxed games, manuals, everything in its original packaging and near-mint.  As you would assume, I took it and it's all sitting on my living room table.  
Just wanted to get some feedback on the purchase and some stuff I should do with it (ie, hardware addons, etc.  Also, is it possible to add a hard drive to those little beasts  :lol: )  
Thanks  :-)

[Crusher]

One in a million.  :-D

£2.50 for that lot!?!?!?  It's a bargain i tell you!

[Vincent]

Maybe you should ask redrumloa after taking a read of this thread ;-)

[Bezzen]

Whoa!

[Effy]

I suggest you buy that chap a beer to thank him  :lol:

[RedskullDC]

Hey Darklight,

Darklight wrote:
Just wanted to get some feedback on the purchase and some stuff I should do with it (ie, hardware addons, etc.  Also, is it possible to add a hard drive to those little beasts  :lol: )  
Thanks  :-)

Not a bad score.

Mate of mine gave me a 128D last year, since he had no time to play with it anymore. It wasn't in a box, and could hardly be called in 'new' condition (he was/is something of a hardware hacker like myself  :-D ).

I did get a schmidt load of manuals/disks/schematics with it if you should need something in particular? (Since I suspect I am not too far from you).

Best thing about the 128 (apart from the C64 compatibilty mode) in my opinion is the disk controller. It will read almost 5 1/4 disk you can throw at it, with the right software.

Cheers,
Red

[SamuraiCrow]

You can add a hard drive to it but instead I would first recommend you try to find a RAM-Drive or RAM link.  Using a battery-backed RAM expander is much faster than a hard drive and you don't have to worry about finding an old SCSI drive that will work with the CMD HD-40 series hard drive bays if the old one breaks.  (BTW If you DO decide to get a CMD hard drive AND RAM link then be sure to try to find the parallel connector to go between the hard drive and the Ram Link.  It will speed up hard drive access a LOT.)

If you can find one, a CMD FD series floppy drive will let you use High density 3.5" floppy disks with your C128.  Given the low memory consumption of most Commodore software it will seem like a zip drive on a PC.

As for software I used GEOS 128 with my 128 for years.  It's a good piece of software and makes adequate use of whatever hardware you use with it.  I've heard Contiki is better but haven't used it so I can't verify that.

[Darklight]

Thanks for the replies, all.

@ RedSkullDC

Thanks for the offer.  I don't know of anything I need right now, but I might need it soon.  I'm trying to get used to the thing first, lol.  It's so different from the Amiga, and I never used our C64 enough before we sold it to get an A500.  I'm out west, about 15 minutes from Penrith, so by the same token, if you're after anything for your Amigas, I might have it.

@ SamuraiCrow

Thanks for the advice.  I'll see whether I can track down a battery-backed ram expansion or not.  Also, that CMD FD sounds good as well    :-)

One more question - how do I write stuff to disk?  Can I hook it up to my PC or Amiga using a serial cable or something similar and use a transfer program, like on the miggy?

[TjLaZer]

Great find!  Find out what rev the DOS ROM for the 1571 is since you may have trouble loading C64 software with it, you may want a 1571 JiffyDOS ROM for it.  I have an extra here I can sell.

[coldfish]

>how do I write stuff to disk? Can I hook it up to my PC or Amiga using a serial cable or something similar and use a transfer program, like on the miggy?

I'm pretty sure there was a program called StarCommander...

 http://sta.c64.org/sc.html
 
...that let you hook an old 1541 to a PC and read/write data.  Using that you'd be able to get stuff off the net onto disk.

[TjLaZer]

Well if you must know... I use my Amiga 4000 and a Vic 1541 drive to write the D64 images to disk! (Connected via IEC cable) I use IEC to write them, works great...

[Darklight]

@TjLaZer & coldfish

Thanks for the info.  I was mainly interested in backing the disks up because there's quite a few originals there.  It didn't come with an external FD, just the Datasette.  So I'll keep an eye out for an external drive for it.  Thanks for that  :-)