Category:Parallel cables

Parallel cables became popular with Speed DOS and luckily there are some good resources on the net explaining how to add such a cable to your own drive. Such a cable can be added to 1541, 1541C, 1541-II, 1570, 1571 and Oceanic OC-118 / OC-118N drives and will speed up data transfer to the C64 or C128 tremendously. A few programs and quite some backup tasks require a Speed DOS compatible parallel cable while some other programs were written for Dolphin DOS where the cable was changed slightly with version 2 and became incompatible.

A drive with a parallel cable added may also well serve faster transfers to the PC using e.g. StarCommander or NIBtools and an appropriate interface.

Most tasks faced on a C64 system may very well be defeated without a parallel cable especially since nowadays defacto kernal rom speeder is Jiffy DOS - it can be an excellent aid though and when combined with a RAM Expansion Unit you will not want to ever miss it again on any disk backup.

Weblinks to pages dealing with parallel cable construction

• Sta's Commodore Parallel Cable construction site

• Building the 1541 Internal Parallel Cable and it's connection Building the C64 to Disk Drive Parallel Cable by Peter Schepers

• Installing a parallel cable into the Commodore 1541-II drive and (handle this one with care) Commodore parallel transfer cable by WoMo

• Parallelkabel zur Floppybeschleunigung at hardworks.de (german instructions)

Weblinks to programs supporting parallel cables

8bit native:

• FCopy III page hosted by WoMo
• Beastie Copy V1 - 2 Parallel Drives at CSDb

PC:

• Star Commander by STA

Binaries

• tbd - maybe someone wants to do this?