R.I.P: PC↔Commodore transfer related cables

A real zoo of PC/C64-transfer related cables

[Xcables collection, view 1, 118KB]

This section was especially made in contrast to Michael Klein's private cable zoo. I always wondered, what he would have meant with the word »zoo« by only showing three different types of Xcables (please excuse my disrespect). With my last CBM photo session I also made pictures from my personal cable collection, which are presented here.

After starting testing Joe Forster's Star Commander in the mid of 1997 and later beeing invited to join the Star Commander beta test team I helped developing the hard- and software for many of the so named »Xcable« interfaces. I had much fun especially with testing all the different transfer modes and routines with all of my available LPT port cars. I built a huge variety of cable adaptors, type change and extension adaptors as well as Y-LPT connectors.

By the way: Here is the very first mail I wrote to Joe. And I can't believe, that this whole »SC life« started with a GCR related request, huh!

    Date: Tue, 12 Aug 1997 14:42:48 +0200 (DFT)
    From: Wolfgang Moser aka  womo <isa002 (at) advm2 (dot) gm (dot) fh-koeln (dot) de>
    To: sta (at) ludens (dot) elte (dot) hu
    Subject: GCR-Image support for Star Commander
    [...]
    Can you please implement ZipCode-6-support (SixPack ZipCode, GCR-encoded)
    to StarCommander, so that I can backup copy-protected disks to my
    harddisk (I think, you need an nibble/GCR-copy-routine for this).
    If Miha Peternel figures out his new D64-format, you can add
    GCR-D64-Image-support to the Commander later.
    [...]
    

[Xcables collection, view 2, 106KB] As you can see with the pictures I didn't built Xcables, but actually adaptors only. Well, my very first cable was a plain X1541 cable, but it was disassembled and replaced by a configurable Trans64/Disk64e/X1541 adaptor (see left picture, upper right corner, just below the C2N232, grey case'd).

[Configurable combined serial and
parallel Xcable adaptor, 128KB] In the middle and to the right of the left picture you can see the older interfaces, adaptors and type change plugs. The more modern devices are placed to the left of the bottom line. Their cable type can be changed with little configuration boards. The latest version of such a multiple configuration adaptor along with some of the config boards is shown in the picture to the right.

Download versions of the pictures above

• Xcables collection, view 1, 1536x1024 pixels, 488KB
  
  
• Xcables collection, view 2, 1536x1024 pixels, 451KB
  
  
• Configurable combined serial and parallel Xcable adaptor, 1536x1024 pixels, 529KB