I recently purchased a ZoomFloppy board, which allows old Commodore IEC serial devices – most importantly, floppy drives – to be connected to a USB port on a modern computer. It’s a great little device, but the instructions aren’t up to scratch: binary software is provided for Windows, manual installation instructions for OS X, but Linux users are left to their own devices.
Here, if for no other reason than I’ll need these if I have to reinstall it, is how I got the ZoomFloppy working on Ubuntu 14.04. You’ll need an up-to-date compilation environment installed, so start by making sure you’ve got the basics:
sudo apt-get install libusb-dev build-essential linux-headers-generic git
Next, you’ll want to download, compile and install the CC65 compiler. No, you really will. Trust me on this one.
cd ~ git clone https://github.com/cc65/cc65.git cd cc65 make sudo prefix=/usr make install
Assuming all went well, download, compile and install OpenCBM:
cd ~ git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/opencbm/code opencbm cd opencbm/opencbm make -f LINUX/Makefile sudo make -f LINUX/Makefile install install-all install-plugin-xum1541 sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/libopencbm.so.0 /usr/lib/libopencbm.so.0
That last line fixes a problem where OpenCBM ends up looking in the wrong place for its library. Finally, you’ll need to add udev rules for the ZoomFloppy hardware itself:
sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/45-opencbm-parallel.rules
Add the following lines to the bottom of the file, then save and quit:
SUBSYSTEM!="usb_device", ACTION!="add", MODE="0666", GOTO="opencbm_rules_end"
# zoom floppy
ATTRS{idVendor}=="16d0", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0504", GROUP="users", MODE="0666"
LABEL="opencbm_rules_end"Restart udev:
sudo service udev restart
Connect your ZoomFloppy and IEC device and check all is well:
cbmctrl detect
That’s it. Enjoy!
UPDATE:
I’ll probably need to refer to these instructions for enabling the VICE C64/128 emulator to talk to a physical drive via the ZoomFloppy at some point, too. You need to check two options off. The first is Settings -> Peripheral Settings -> Device #8 -> Enable IEC Device. The second Settings -> Peripheral Settings -> Device #8 -> Device Type -> Real Device Access. With both ticked and the ZoomFloppy connected, you can talk to the physical floppy drive as though it were Device 8 (i.e. load”*”,8,1). Huzzah!