My findings are that it only works properly on the 1982 and 1983 board with the MC4044 PLL clock setup. It will also work on the SX-64 because it has the same old clock system.

It won’t work reliably (or at all, usually) on a machine with the 8701 clock chip.

The revision of the VIC-II does not matter. R56A/R7/R8/R9 all work.

Can’t remember. Will try out 🙂

The carts only worked with early VIC-II chips. Like the 5-pin A/V ones. It is interesting when tinkering with an 80 column card I was trying to adapt on a C64C I manage to make it to work, but it was very erratic and trial and error.

Wow that is amazing!

I’ll check it out for sure! I’m not sure if it’s a good thing these carts were so hard to find as it made moving to a 286 all the better, but the CP/M apps like basic, pascal were not only better but even had compilers.

I forget what the fundamental flaw was with the cartridges, but I recall that the 128 had the same issues in development.

Under emulation at least, it’s very underwhelming. And you absolutely need that 80col program, otherwise it’s unusable. But as a side effect of the 80 column program, it’s very slow.

I set Vice to 1:1 speed, and Infocom games were insanely slow, like it made the regular 40col c64 side feel zippy, which it most certainly is not.

That being said, with no real good way to transfer data in and out of those 1541 disks it really was stillborn. Not that the thing had any real legs in the first place. A 8088 co processor with MS-DOS 1.25 support would have been equally disastrous, although a little more fun to have a PC in a C64.

When the Commodore 64 was released, Commodore promised it would be “CP/M compatible.” That implied that it would be able to run the thousands of CP/M programs that were already out there. When that didn’t happen, there was a class action lawsuit. As part of the settlement, Commodore made this cartridge, which they did not promote because they never wanted to make it in the first place. That’s the other reason it is so rare.

My grandmother asked me what I wanted for Christmas in 1985 and this was in the clearance section of the store we were in for $5 (and another $5 for the Commodore-published Nevada COBOL for the CP/M cartridge) and that’s what I got. Completely useless. Wish I still had it. 🙂

When did you pick it up?

Ha! that certainly explains why the config programme didn’t work for the second drive!

I was also kind of surprised that Microsoft Basic when loaded up only has about 15kb free. I need to go digging around for the memory map display tool thing. It seems that the more I try to use this thing, the less of a power house it turns out to be.

Oh be sure to post back how using the C128 to manipulate C64 CP/M diskettes goes! No doubt someone will also care somewhere..