Great to see this venerable program featured in this time, on the last statement of 8-bit glory. Oh and that RamLink is a nice touch, I once thought I bought the only one.
My RAMLink is a very early model with the 1581-style PSU. I've since seen later versions that were produced with the small wall warts, like what the FD-2000 got. Which version RL do you have?
very very nice! I'm guessing that was the last revision of the RAMLink, though I don't know for sure. But I'd be surprised if they updated beyond '97. They were so focused on the 128 SuperCPU by then! @@vcv6560
Man, it is always such a joy watching your highly informative and extremely well done videos. One can really feel the love for this great system(s) in your voice. Thank you so much, you really saved my day! 🖖🏻
OMG Doug, I'm so honored to see you here. Thanks for the kind words. Means a lot. You were in the back of my mind quite often during the making of this.
I got through high school in the late '80s with GEOS. But at the time a lot of teachers didn't accept printed assignments for reasons lost to time. The only teacher that let me hand in printed works was my physics teacher, and I was such a nerd that I kept the graded printout. I still have it... The least open-minded teacher I had back then was my "computer science" teacher who was a PC chauvinist and was somehow offended that a C64 could produce GEOS-level printouts... Oh and I used a 1526 printer I bought on liquidation, impressed by the print quality but not knowing at the time how unbelievably slow it was in graphics mode. It took IIRC nearly half an hour per page.
That's super cool! I really love reading your history here. We must be nearly the same age (I graduated in '89). And I recall anti-print teachers like that, too. Most of my papers HAD to be written in cursive, college ruled, etc. I think they felt typing and printing was somehow skating out of Real Work, which was total b.s. but a bias of the times.
@@AmigaLoveThinking back, probably the low quality of most printers at the time was why teachers didn't like printouts. I mean most printers were barely more than cash register receipt printers with a Centronics port. The 1526 with its square pins and plastic ribbon really looked good in comparison. And not too many people had Laserwriters in their living rooms in the 1980s...
I used Geos128 back in the day and really enjoying this series. Great presentation and it's awesome to see the top of the line C= hardware in action. I recall seeing the CMD stuff in RUN magazine around 91-92 and daydreaming what it would be like to supercharge my system!
Really glad you enjoyed it and thank you for the kind words. I absolutely love RUN magazine. In fact, CMD bought the RUN backstock when RUN shut down and CMD continued to try and sell of their mags. Some of the RUN staff even wrote for Commodore World on occasion (like Steve Vander Ark). A lot of cool cross-breeding going on between those two outfits.
Love it. Coming at us with another great video. Thanks for sharing the setup. For sure a dream setup for us Commodore people. GEOS was such a big deal back then and gave the 64/128 a new lease on life to be sure. The amount of GEOS programs and files that popped up on Q-Link was staggering. People loved it. I was a download maniac back then, but could not keep up with all things GEOS, and my other C64 interests at the time. 6 cents per minute / $3.60 an hour added up fast.
I wonder how many GEOS public domain (or published) softwares have been lost to the sands of time that were distributed on BBSes but never sold in stores... Do you still have your old downloads on disk? Thanks for the kind words. Means a lot.
It's taken a loooong time for me to get to this point. Now if I could just find that final piece of the puzzle, I can stop feeling so insane about it all. ;)
Wow. Another company made a battery backed RAM disk..... in an era where RAM was ridiculously expensive. Applied Engineering made a card for the Apple IIgs called the RAMKeeper around the same time frame, battery backup and all. That card actually partitioned off system RAM. I was half expecting a laser printer with this setup. I think someone made PCL or PostScript drivers for GEOS. (psst, guess what color the default desktop background is in GS/OS?)
Hey! Thanks for your awesome comment. I considered a laser printer - which was 100% supported back in the day - but getting a period correct *working* laser printer was just way too out of my league. But I'd love to explore the GeoLaser drivers some day for sure. I decided the "safer" bet was locating the top notch dot matrix choice. I got REALLY lucky. And honestly, I do love that grindy sound. Cheers!
I've used Geos v2 128 also on a DCR. The geocable II rocked when printing from a HP 5L laser! Commodore should of bought Jiffydos and included as default on every c64
I've often thought that, too. Backwards compatibility was high, and the benefits are obvious to most that have ever used JiffyDOS. Plus, if 'kids' didn't want to use JiffyDOS all the BASIC is right there ready to go, too. I specifically avoided Laser printers with this setup and wanted to source one of the best dot matrix options mainly for that sound, because I'm a dork. But yeah, would be fun to mess with GeoLaser in the future.
Maurice Randall's PostPrint is the best way to go from a geocable. I don't remember if you had to have Wheels to run PostPrint? Embedding jpeg images in your geopublish documents was super awesome and could be color.
I have 1541x3 1571x3 1581 CMD HD clone 4GB i have a CMD 2000 clone which I pluged 12VDC into so its sits broken. Have C128x3 C128DCR Amiga 1084 Love GEOS REU 1700 512 1764 512 1758 U2* I moved 5 mo ago need to get a battle Station again! I have Gate Way all OEM did not set up. All docs are here too! No Ram link but I think that is not neede untill I find another CMD drive. Keep up the great job learned some insights, Thank you! i have a PAL 64 and 4 ohters. I guess I am sick!
haha I think we all have various stages of that (wonderful) sickness. Glad you learned a few things. Once you get gateWay set up I predict you'll get hooked and not go back to standard GEOS except when forced to. The gateWay really opens up a lot of exciting doors with your amazing CMD collection. I'd start with just your C128Dcr and FD-2000 and go from there. If you format your FD-2000 disks to CMD NATV, you'll have more space on just a couple disks than you'll likely need. So for you, the C128, REU and FD would be a sweeeeeeeet setup! Then you can add the HD later on, move everything over, make it the boot drive, etc. Good times!
TY for the GREAT retro Commodore content! I see exactly at 8 min into the video your 7 mint looking Infocom Grey box's and also your Wishbringer in Solid Gold version. They only made 6 Solid Gold games and I had 4 of them and I was missing Wishbringer and the Solid Gold Triple Pack. I found a Solid Gold Wishbringer a week ago and it should be here any day now. I have never seen the Solid Gold Triple Pack (Leather Goddesses, HHGTTG and Zork I) listed but will always be looking for it so the I can own all 6 Solid Gold games. I was able to find Deadline in a Grey Box two months ago, so I now have all the games that had a Grey Box version now in a Grey box version. I have GEOS128v2 and use UII+ with a boot image for fast startups into GEOS. Can I use Gateway even thought I don't have and CMD drives? My setup is C128DCR, a 2nd 1571, a 1581 and a UII+. OMG now I want CMD FD-2000! I thought it was just a 1581 drive after Commodore stopped making them. Man, I was so WRONG! TY for teaching me about the CMD FD-2000. I like how you said, "If I ever find a Super CPU", well you are now halfway there with the Super CPU MMU. GREAT video! TY again!
Gateway doen't require CMD drives. CMD drives just give you a lot more bang for the buck since you can use the CMD native format. Funny: I actually do own a SuperCPU now (got it for 750) but it is a SuperCPU for C64-only. In theory I could possibly swap out the ROMs and add the MMU so I could use it with my C128D, but I've not gone down that road.... ;)
I use a WiFi modem to get onto BBSes these days, but yeah - that would be cool! I think there's a new "turbo" something or rather these days but I've not looked into it. Did you ever get any of CMD's smart mouse or trackballs? I've never actually ever seen one outside of a magazine.
I hear the 128DCR has an issue with some peripherals (because the tape port is on the side whereas the serial port is on the back. So if a device needs both, you'll need some form of extension). Have you ever run into this? I'm interested in acquiring one to develop the 8 bit port of OceanThrill Murder Mystery on but, ideally, I wanna have a device to either load floppy/tape images to through an SD card or via WIFI.
Hi Mark, I've never run into this issue myself. I have some printers that use interfaces that need the tape port and it's totally fine. If you're going to get a DCR, you've already got disks as it is. If you use something like a SD2IEC, you're going to get power from the User Port, which will reach the serial port just fine.
I had one years ago, and even had a box of those quad density floppies intended for use with it wasn't able to obtain any more at the time so I formatted a standard HD (i1.6 MB usually) as a QD *3.2 MB). It worked just fine..
@@jm131719 Yes, I've gone down quite the rabbit hole around this topic. I have 4 ED disks a friend of mine gave me - never used. But of course we all wanted to figure out the HD conversion. The drive mechanisms the new drives use (Sony) are different than the ones they used back in the day (TEAC) and they have different sensors. After many experiments, we finally got a system down to where the conversions work 100% of the time now. Thank goodness, because HD disks are everywhere! Pretty cool.
I've never personally used DolphinDOS and live in the US where CMD was based and developed its products. DolphinDOS sounds very similar to jiffyDOS but presumably aimed at the German market, albeit for only 5 years or so?
Update: I replaced the RAM in my RAMLink and the data stability issues completely vanished. It's rock solid now. Boom!
Great to see this venerable program featured in this time, on the last statement of 8-bit glory. Oh and that RamLink is a nice touch, I once thought I bought the only one.
My RAMLink is a very early model with the 1581-style PSU. I've since seen later versions that were produced with the small wall warts, like what the FD-2000 got. Which version RL do you have?
@@AmigaLove, rev 2D purchased February 97, $225 for 1M, and backup battery (6V 6Ah and yes a small wall wart.
very very nice! I'm guessing that was the last revision of the RAMLink, though I don't know for sure. But I'd be surprised if they updated beyond '97. They were so focused on the 128 SuperCPU by then! @@vcv6560
Man, it is always such a joy watching your highly informative and extremely well done videos. One can really feel the love for this great system(s) in your voice. Thank you so much, you really saved my day! 🖖🏻
If I could frame a comment, I would frame this one. You made MY day. Maybe I'll print it out on my Star NL-10 and actually frame it after all. 🖖🏻
Great video! It warms my soul to see people still using and talking about CMD products. Thanks for this.
OMG Doug, I'm so honored to see you here. Thanks for the kind words. Means a lot. You were in the back of my mind quite often during the making of this.
After several other short-lived printers, the Star NL-10 is the printer I had growing up all the way until I went to college. It was a great printer!
I remember being absolutely shocked by GEOS on my C64 when it was released!
I got through high school in the late '80s with GEOS. But at the time a lot of teachers didn't accept printed assignments for reasons lost to time. The only teacher that let me hand in printed works was my physics teacher, and I was such a nerd that I kept the graded printout. I still have it... The least open-minded teacher I had back then was my "computer science" teacher who was a PC chauvinist and was somehow offended that a C64 could produce GEOS-level printouts...
Oh and I used a 1526 printer I bought on liquidation, impressed by the print quality but not knowing at the time how unbelievably slow it was in graphics mode. It took IIRC nearly half an hour per page.
That's super cool! I really love reading your history here. We must be nearly the same age (I graduated in '89). And I recall anti-print teachers like that, too. Most of my papers HAD to be written in cursive, college ruled, etc. I think they felt typing and printing was somehow skating out of Real Work, which was total b.s. but a bias of the times.
@@AmigaLoveThinking back, probably the low quality of most printers at the time was why teachers didn't like printouts. I mean most printers were barely more than cash register receipt printers with a Centronics port.
The 1526 with its square pins and plastic ribbon really looked good in comparison.
And not too many people had Laserwriters in their living rooms in the 1980s...
This is the *best* video on this topic I have seen to date yet. Thanks!
Thank you. You've made my day! Appreciate that.
I used Geos128 back in the day and really enjoying this series. Great presentation and it's awesome to see the top of the line C= hardware in action. I recall seeing the CMD stuff in RUN magazine around 91-92 and daydreaming what it would be like to supercharge my system!
Really glad you enjoyed it and thank you for the kind words. I absolutely love RUN magazine. In fact, CMD bought the RUN backstock when RUN shut down and CMD continued to try and sell of their mags. Some of the RUN staff even wrote for Commodore World on occasion (like Steve Vander Ark). A lot of cool cross-breeding going on between those two outfits.
Love it. Coming at us with another great video. Thanks for sharing the setup. For sure a dream setup for us Commodore people. GEOS was such a big deal back then and gave the 64/128 a new lease on life to be sure. The amount of GEOS programs and files that popped up on Q-Link was staggering. People loved it. I was a download maniac back then, but could not keep up with all things GEOS, and my other C64 interests at the time. 6 cents per minute / $3.60 an hour added up fast.
I wonder how many GEOS public domain (or published) softwares have been lost to the sands of time that were distributed on BBSes but never sold in stores... Do you still have your old downloads on disk?
Thanks for the kind words. Means a lot.
Q-link days were golden,great times and too many files to download costing plus time :)
Geos is so stylish and even more so in scanlines!
Great, great narration and fitting voice that reflects the obsession by these gadgets. 🙏
Fantastic showcase Eric, congratulations on a great video and a great setup. I thoroughly enjoyed it. One day I shall replicate, one day.
Thanks, Slaine. Glad you enjoyed it. I always look forward to seeing you around these parts.
@@AmigaLove awe shucks, you made me blush.
Great video! You have an Awesome C128DCR setup there! More C128 content would be great! 😃
Speaking of chef's kiss: Excellent video! Another love letter to Commodore computing :)
Thank you, Dane. ;)
All this gear makes me... well, jealous. VERY JEALOUS. 😆
It's taken a loooong time for me to get to this point. Now if I could just find that final piece of the puzzle, I can stop feeling so insane about it all. ;)
Great work and presentation (as usual)! Thank you for showing us how all these great pieces of hardware of come together!
Thank you so much, Steve! I really appreciate the kind words - and it's always an honor to know you've been here checking one out.
Wow. Another company made a battery backed RAM disk..... in an era where RAM was ridiculously expensive. Applied Engineering made a card for the Apple IIgs called the RAMKeeper around the same time frame, battery backup and all. That card actually partitioned off system RAM.
I was half expecting a laser printer with this setup. I think someone made PCL or PostScript drivers for GEOS.
(psst, guess what color the default desktop background is in GS/OS?)
Hey! Thanks for your awesome comment. I considered a laser printer - which was 100% supported back in the day - but getting a period correct *working* laser printer was just way too out of my league. But I'd love to explore the GeoLaser drivers some day for sure. I decided the "safer" bet was locating the top notch dot matrix choice. I got REALLY lucky. And honestly, I do love that grindy sound. Cheers!
I have the exact opposite setup as yours... I only have a SuperCPU and none of the other CMD products! You have quite a collection!
Dude! To be flying in 20 Mhz with gateWay would be dreamy I'd have to ... well, imagine!
I've used Geos v2 128 also on a DCR. The geocable II rocked when printing from a HP 5L laser! Commodore should of bought Jiffydos and included as default on every c64
I've often thought that, too. Backwards compatibility was high, and the benefits are obvious to most that have ever used JiffyDOS. Plus, if 'kids' didn't want to use JiffyDOS all the BASIC is right there ready to go, too.
I specifically avoided Laser printers with this setup and wanted to source one of the best dot matrix options mainly for that sound, because I'm a dork. But yeah, would be fun to mess with GeoLaser in the future.
Maurice Randall's PostPrint is the best way to go from a geocable. I don't remember if you had to have Wheels to run PostPrint? Embedding jpeg images in your geopublish documents was super awesome and could be color.
I have 1541x3 1571x3 1581 CMD HD clone 4GB i have a CMD 2000 clone which I pluged 12VDC into so its sits broken. Have C128x3 C128DCR Amiga 1084 Love GEOS REU 1700 512 1764 512 1758 U2* I moved 5 mo ago need to get a battle Station again! I have Gate Way all OEM did not set up. All docs are here too! No Ram link but I think that is not neede untill I find another CMD drive. Keep up the great job learned some insights, Thank you! i have a PAL 64 and 4 ohters. I guess I am sick!
I have a U64 1.1 not set up in box and SDIEC x 3 and two OKIDATA 180 one never used found in school storage. Maaybe more. Yea love GEOS 20 boots
haha I think we all have various stages of that (wonderful) sickness. Glad you learned a few things. Once you get gateWay set up I predict you'll get hooked and not go back to standard GEOS except when forced to. The gateWay really opens up a lot of exciting doors with your amazing CMD collection. I'd start with just your C128Dcr and FD-2000 and go from there. If you format your FD-2000 disks to CMD NATV, you'll have more space on just a couple disks than you'll likely need. So for you, the C128, REU and FD would be a sweeeeeeeet setup! Then you can add the HD later on, move everything over, make it the boot drive, etc. Good times!
Keen to see a current day update with an Ultimate 64! Surely must be some way to get a more current printer to work with is usb maybe?
If you use a Commodore 64, I believe you could use the Turbo Chameleon to get a lot of the pieces in place. Just not with the 128.
TY for the GREAT retro Commodore content! I see exactly at 8 min into the video your 7 mint looking Infocom Grey box's and also your Wishbringer in Solid Gold version. They only made 6 Solid Gold games and I had 4 of them and I was missing Wishbringer and the Solid Gold Triple Pack. I found a Solid Gold Wishbringer a week ago and it should be here any day now. I have never seen the Solid Gold Triple Pack (Leather Goddesses, HHGTTG and Zork I) listed but will always be looking for it so the I can own all 6 Solid Gold games. I was able to find Deadline in a Grey Box two months ago, so I now have all the games that had a Grey Box version now in a Grey box version. I have GEOS128v2 and use UII+ with a boot image for fast startups into GEOS. Can I use Gateway even thought I don't have and CMD drives? My setup is C128DCR, a 2nd 1571, a 1581 and a UII+. OMG now I want CMD FD-2000! I thought it was just a 1581 drive after Commodore stopped making them. Man, I was so WRONG! TY for teaching me about the CMD FD-2000. I like how you said, "If I ever find a Super CPU", well you are now halfway there with the Super CPU MMU. GREAT video! TY again!
Gateway doen't require CMD drives. CMD drives just give you a lot more bang for the buck since you can use the CMD native format. Funny: I actually do own a SuperCPU now (got it for 750) but it is a SuperCPU for C64-only. In theory I could possibly swap out the ROMs and add the MMU so I could use it with my C128D, but I've not gone down that road.... ;)
very nice
Thanks
That's mean! I always wanted to have the devices myself. :-( To see them all like this now... WANTED TO!!! 😭😭😭😭
Don't feel bad. It took me a lot of time (and $) to build this battle station like this.
Great video!
Thanks for the visit :)
Still want a modern FD2000 clone.
I've heard through the grapevine that one is indeed in the works.
you need a rs232 swiftlink that they bought out from dr evil labs
I use a WiFi modem to get onto BBSes these days, but yeah - that would be cool! I think there's a new "turbo" something or rather these days but I've not looked into it.
Did you ever get any of CMD's smart mouse or trackballs? I've never actually ever seen one outside of a magazine.
They have internal Swiftlink compatible WIFI modems that work great.
Cool video! Would love to get a RAMLink. But I do have a SuperCPU which makes using GEOS(Wheels) almost seamless.
That's awesome. Is yours a 128 version?
@@AmigaLove sadly no :(
@@pauldeane8369 Still! A SuperCPU is a SuperCPU. A Ferrari is a Ferrari!
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
Should I be ashamed if I say I am jealous? Extremely jealous:)
Not at all. It took me a long time (and $$) to get to this happy place. OK, so ... maybe a little I guess. Sorry! ;)
I hear the 128DCR has an issue with some peripherals (because the tape port is on the side whereas the serial port is on the back. So if a device needs both, you'll need some form of extension).
Have you ever run into this? I'm interested in acquiring one to develop the 8 bit port of OceanThrill Murder Mystery on but, ideally, I wanna have a device to either load floppy/tape images to through an SD card or via WIFI.
Hi Mark,
I've never run into this issue myself. I have some printers that use interfaces that need the tape port and it's totally fine. If you're going to get a DCR, you've already got disks as it is. If you use something like a SD2IEC, you're going to get power from the User Port, which will reach the serial port just fine.
What do you think of Geos Mega Patch? Thanks
Too bad you dudn't have a CMD FD-4000. You can reliably format a 3.5" HD floppy to 3.2 MB. More storage space = more better...
I have one... as of about a week ago. Brand new! :)
I had one years ago, and even had a box of those quad density floppies intended for use with it wasn't able to obtain any more at the time so I formatted a standard HD (i1.6 MB usually) as a QD *3.2 MB). It worked just fine..
@@jm131719 Yes, I've gone down quite the rabbit hole around this topic. I have 4 ED disks a friend of mine gave me - never used. But of course we all wanted to figure out the HD conversion. The drive mechanisms the new drives use (Sony) are different than the ones they used back in the day (TEAC) and they have different sensors. After many experiments, we finally got a system down to where the conversions work 100% of the time now. Thank goodness, because HD disks are everywhere! Pretty cool.
what about DolphinDOS ...?
I've never personally used DolphinDOS and live in the US where CMD was based and developed its products. DolphinDOS sounds very similar to jiffyDOS but presumably aimed at the German market, albeit for only 5 years or so?