Since 0.83.21 beta of Star Commander, the OpenCBM driver is supported. (Yes, a DOS program is accessing physical hardware via a Windows driver.) See the "Usage" section of the documentation for more details.

After reading through this thread, I just have to put my 2 cents worth in the hat. I purchased a XA1541 adapter for less than $20 and set about putting Windows 98SE on one of my early Pent 4 computers. I downloaded Star Commander and fumbled around for several days trying to get the thing working, and was getting nowhere.

I had posted a thread asking for help to get my equipment working so I could download programs to play on my C64. While I was waiting, I decided to go ahead and download openCBM and CBMXfer on one of my Win XP Pro computers. This is going to sound like a lot of BS, but it is the honest truth, I was transferring program files to my 1541 drive in less than 15 minutes--part of that time was setting the computer up.

CBMXfer is so easy to use, that I can not for the life of me understand why anyone would use anything else. I have not found any program that I could not send to the 1541 or make a d64 (or any other file type)file from the 1541, and I have done a ton of transferring over the last week. I had not done any of this working with PCs to or from the 8-bit computer before, and if I could manage to make this work on my own, anyone can

CBMXfer will tell you what files you need to copy over to it from the openCBM folder. Just download both and unzip them, then open CBMXfer and start doing what you need to do. Steve Gray's instructions for CBMXfer are easy and straight forward and easy to follow, so just "get er dun!"
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I just got cbm4win working tonight. It's slow , but it works...

My PC is homebuilt, with an ASRock Athlon XP motherboard (about 2004 vintage), and the parallel port is configured EPP. cbm4win fired up effortlessly.

What I did notice, and I'm not sure if this has anything to do with any of the earlier posters not being able to write some .D64 images: cbm4win does not appear to like spaces in the image file name -- it starts to send the image to the 1541, then gives up almost immediately. When I take all of the spaces out, it writes the image correctly.

One other weird thing I'm seeing is that cbm4win reports the floppy as still having 664 blocks free after the image has been written -- when I take it downstairs to the 1541 connected to the C-64, the free blocks read correctly.

I've only done a couple so far, so the jury is probably still out, but the first image I did ran successfully in my C-64. And I just tried Exile, which worked also (at least at the beginning).

My first attempt was with Star Commander under Windows 98 on an older Pentium 1 box, but I was never able to get DOS to see the 1541 on its parallel port no matter which BIOS settings I tried. So I came upstairs to the XP system out of desperation... for some reason I thought the older DOS box would have been easier to get working than XP would. I guess that I just didn't have a compatible parallel port on that one (the motherboard is an Abit TX-5).

I'm still going to look at OpenCBM and CBMXfer just for fun, though.

edit:

I just discovered that OpenCBM and cbm4win are one in the same (noob ). So it looks like I just need to add the CBMXfer front end to my current installation to try that one out.

I'm still stumped as to why the XA1541 adapter didn't work on the Abit TX-5 board. I got that specifically because I understood it to be the most compatible with the widest variety of parallel port types. The test utility would fire up the drive, but it would just spin endlessly with the drive LED active. XCDETECT saw the parallel port, but said that there were no IEC drives on the cable... selecting the "B" option just spun the drive endlessly like the test routine did. I think that all of this discouraged me from pursuing SC any further, sadly. I really thought that that was going to be how I'd end up doing this.

But, conversely, I didn't have to test anything with cbm4win on XP -- I just ran the installation, fired up the GUI, and I was writing floppies in minutes.

edit:

Doesn't looks like there's a whole lot of difference between CBMXfer and gui4cbm4win...

This seemed like the solution to all my issues. So actioned and followed and all worked well. SC is running and acan access all menus. Soon a i fire up the 1571 tho everything stops and SC just hangs.
Sometime can get it to do one thing read a disk or format as disk but then soon as i change floppy's then again hangs and just stops.

Any pointers as this is driving me nuts.
I had a good little system running with this 1571 and 98se but the Motherboard died and i can revive it. Not having SC working and running is killing me ........

B.
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Hope this isn't too stupid a question... but, here we go

Will star commander work using Dos Box on WinXP?
I think I'll just stick to using OpenCBM when my cable arrives, but... I know Star Commander runs using Dos Box, but will it actually transfer files?

Well guys.. I HAD the XE1541 cable working about 5 years ago with a Dell C600 laptop and Win98. It worked like a charm.

I wasted a whole 2 days trying to get the XE1541 and XM1541 cable working. I learnt how to make a USB drive boot DOS7.1.. How to make Win98 boot from a USB drive..

The only real problem was that I only have one old PC with a parallel port. It had XP on it.. I couldn't get the parallel port working with SC no matter how I tried (I know userport.sys etc is required because I used the parallel port in one of my own programs to drive an LCD display).

Anyway, that old PC wouldn't boot to USB.. So I found a bootmanager called Plop that booted the USB stick.. once! Then it all stopped working.. I installed Win98 on the PC but it wouldn't recognise any of my USB drives.. I had no means of copying files over and couldn't bring myself to write loads of CDRs.. So .. in the end.. I gave up and accepted defeat. Hell I was even looking on eBay for another cheap Dell C600..

However! I did find something really cool which some of you guys in the same boat may or may not have seen. Check out the link below - it allows your C64/Vic to access an SD card as if it were a disk drive. Now this I like the sound of!

http://store.go4retro.com/products/uIEC_SD.html