There's a few Manitobans on this site. I'm one of them. Although I'm really an Ontarian in disguise, even born in the GTA... so feel free to hate me, you 'tobans. (This is only my 3rd winter here...)

But I've been a Commodore user since 1985 or so. Our elementary school had C64s and ICONs in the classrooms. Obviously, the ICON was a piece of work, but the C64 was actually fun. My parents used a good chunk of my paper route money to buy a C64. (With my permission... I had been begging...)

Funny thing is, the store where we got it included a pirated disk with several games. Thus began the honorable hobby of getting copied games rather than purchasing them. As of now I have more purchased games than I did at any time as a kid. Ebay (especially Eli Tomlinson's store) has been very helpful.

Along the way I did a bit of coding. If I ever bother getting an xe-1541 cable I'll be sure to subject you all to the demo my brother and I made. All in BASIC, all crap.

Many fond memories of typing in proggies from the Compute's Gazette. Even subscribed to it for the last year of its publication as a paper magazine (as part of Compute).

Cheers all. And for the record, my nick is qaz112 instead of qaz1 because of qazi, whose name was so close to mine when I signed on.

(EDIT: This 112=1 because at one point there was a region of Canada which used 112 as the signifier for dialling long distance...)
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The reason all of our schools had ICONs is because they were developed expressly for schools in Ontario. Every Ontarian our age who is interested in computers has a story about banging their heads on the wall waiting for the ICON to complete disk operations. My goodness, they were so slow. Don't blame QNX though, it's a fantastic real-time OS. Blame the underpowered 80186 CPU, the lack of RAM and the glacially paced ARCNET.

There was one good thing about the ICONs. Their arrival rendered the PETs and 64s surplus so the principal decided to disperse the old computers throughout the school. Every classroom had at least one and there were a bunch of them in the library too which made it much easier to get time on them. The best part was that the electronics teacher managed to acquire more than his fair share which was great because all of us computer geeks use to hang out in the electronics lab. Ah, the joys of unfettered access.

If you want more info on the ICON, have a gander at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys_ICON.

Jesus, how many Qaz people are there ?

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Welcome!

Always see you posting in the mini-chat but its good to see you posting the main forum too...
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Roger: Correct response is, "Not nearly enough."
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OK. I have a PentiumII-300MHz machine with a 6 Gig HD of which I was planning on dedicating about a gig to C64 usage. Figured whatever cable would work would work, as it were.

If I want to use 64HDD, that pretty much eliminates the whole XM/XA family, but if I want to use cbm4win, that excises XE... so give me a hand here. If my primary purpose is to use .d64 files from the hdd and/or xfer back and forth, which is better?
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I'm in a hurry right now.
Best option is to get an XE- or XM-cable and additionally get an XE-XM-converter, so you have practically both cables. Or you try to get a cable with an embedded switch, which switches between XE and XM mode.
Cbm4win is for transferring files between PC and floppy drive and 64HDD is an cbm drive emulator, PC and C64 are connected in the latter case.

check this for proof...


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So much for my introduction thread
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No worries.
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XE cable works fine on my old PII-300 box. No parallel port on my XP machine (a lappy) so until someone figures out a brilliant way to connect a Commodore serial cable to USB, XE is good enough for me.
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Cool intro guv'nor - welcome from a fellow c64-er from London
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