Re: I got my new 64Ultimate

Hallo Ruud,


sorry for the late reply.

Am 30.04.26 um 11:46 schrieb ruud_at_baltissen.org:
> Hallo allemaal,
>
>
> Last year I got an unexpected bonus and decide to buy a 64Ultimate 
> from Gideon. He pointed me to commodore.net and there I bought the 
> Starlight Breadbin version. First impression: good. Only the 
> documentation could be a bit better.
> But now: what am I going to do with it?
Indeed a good question ;-)
> I'm not a game man, I want to do some technical stuff with it. I was 
> thinking of exploiting its technical advancements in combination with 
> already existing software. One idea is to combine my 1541 hard disk 
> project with the C64U: it would handle D64 files faster and better 
> IMHO. But my projects handles the hardware of an attached IDE HDD 
> directly and I have no idea yet what I have to do to access the D64s 
> on, for example, the attached SD card.
> The source code of GEOS is available but IMHO I think that is too big 
> for a "beginner".
> Then I ran into Andre's GeckoOS and that looks like something I think 
> I can handle. I'll start with assembling the code first and then run 
> it on the C64U

That's a good choice of course :-)

I already tried GeckOS on it, and it works as expected in C64 mode.

The one gripe I have with the C64U - once you access the (emulated or 
true hardware) floppy drive, the whole machine is slowed down to the 
original speed. I.e. even if only an emulated drive is used, which 
could, as in VICE, be run at a faster speed, it does not do so.

I contacted Gideon about it and he said there is just not enough fast 
RAM available to run the floppy at the same fast speed as the C64.

Unfortunately, GeckOS is a heavy disk user. Due to the limited memory, 
almost all shell commands are loaded from disk. And that slows the 
machine down again.

But, there is hope. I have already started looking into the "Ultimate 
filesystem" - a way to access the SD Card / USB stick (as I understand) 
on the C64U. This is of course way faster and would be a really nice way 
of running GeckOS on the C64U. I have got to the point to get a "0, OK" 
from this filesystem right now just to test it, and need to find time to 
actually implement the filesystem driver for it. Which shouldn't be a 
big problem now that I understand how it works, it's just a time issue.

André

>
> Any other ideas from your side are welcome!
>
> FYI: I'm not a sound ot graphic man.
>
>