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Tag - Networks

How to access a network share on the Amiga

After getting it online this has to be the next best thing your can do with your Amiga. Being able to access a network share on the Amiga is really a liberating experience. It affords you not just the freedom to quickly access files you may have downloaded on your PC but also near unlimited extra storage for your Amiga. It’s quite a straightforward process and I’ll go through the whole thing from start to finish in this post.

Before going any further it’s assumed that you already have your Amiga networked and have configured a TCP/IP Stack as these are essential. You will also need a Windows based PC to create a shared folder on (or a suitable NAS that supports the SMB1).

 

Installing the Amiga Software

I’ll deal with the Amiga installation side of things first as that’s much more straightforward. To begin with you need to download two packages off Aminet, smbfs-68k.lha and SMBMounter.lha.

We only need a single file from the SMBFS package so simply extract the LHA archive to your RAM disk and then copy the ‘SMBFS’ file to your C: drive. (Strictly speaking if you are comfortable with the command line then this is all you need but we’re going to install a GUI for it, hence the need for SMBMounter).

Next extract the SMBMounter archive, run the installer and select ‘Intermediate User’ as shown below.

 

Installing SMBMounter

Installing SMBMounter

 

Select ‘Install for real’.

 

Installing SMBMounter

Installing SMBMounter

 

Choose where to install the software. It doesn’t really matter but in my case I selected my ‘Internet’ drawer as I like to keep all my internet/network related stuff in one place. Note that you do not need to create an SMBMounter drawer – one will be created automatically in the location you choose.

 

Installing SMBMounter

Installing SMBMounter

 

Next choose a language if English is not your native tongue.

 

Installing SMBMounter

Installing SMBMounter

 

The final thing to choose is the icon set that will be used for the program files. I’m using OS3.2 and like GlowIcons so chose that option.

 

Installing SMBMounter

Installing SMBMounter

 

The program will now be installed. After a few seconds you should get an ‘Installation Complete’ message along with a reminder of the install location.

 

Installing SMBMounter

Installing SMBMounter

 

If everything went well you should have a drawer looking just like the one in the photo below.

 

access a network share on the Amiga

Installing SMBMounter

 

That’s it for the Amiga side of things, at least for now anyway. Time to boot up your Windows PC and configure something for the Amiga to connect to!

 

Configuring an SMB1 Share on a PC

 

Enabling SMB1

I just want to preface this section by saying that I created this guide on a Windows 11 PC (which was upgraded from a Windows 10 install). It should work with older versions of Windows too. However Microsoft is actively trying to kill off SMB1 (see here) so if you are reading this in the future you may have a few extra hoops you need to jump through to get this working. (Alternatively just use an old PC running Windows 10!)

Right, with that out of the way the first thing you must do is determine whether your PC has SMB1 file sharing enabled, and if not, enable it. The easiest way to achieve this is to open the ‘Turn Windows features on or off’ control panel.

 

Turn Windows Features on or off

Turn Windows Features on or off

 

To do this use the start menu search facility and type ‘features’. Windows will have a rummage around the C: drive and then present you with the program so you can just click on it as shown above.

 

Turn Windows Features on or off

Checking that SMB1 client/server is enabled.

 

Scroll down the list until you get to the SMB section. You want to see little check boxes next to ‘SMB 1.0/CIFS Client’ and ‘SMB 1.0/CIFS Server’. If they aren’t ticked, click in the little boxes to enable them and then click on OK. You will have to restart Windows for it to complete the installation of the new features.

Please note you do NOT want to have a check mark next to ‘SMB 1.0/CIFS Automatic Removal’. If you do have it ticked this will cause Windows to remove SMB after a few weeks of the protocol not being utilised.

 

Creating a Local User Account

This part isn’t strictly necessary but I recommend it as it helps keep things neat and tidy and also prevents issues in the future should you change your PC account password. I’m doing this in Windows 11 Home. There are multiple ways to achieve this but I’m just going to describe one method which is very straightforward. If you already know how to do this then skip to the next section.

Firstly using the start menu search enter ”netplwiz’ and then run the program that Windows finds.

 

NETPLWIZ

Running NETPLWIZ to access user accounts.

 

This will bring up the ‘User Accounts’ window. You should see at least one account here which will be your main Windows account. There may be others too, depending on how many people use the PC.

 

Windows 11 User Accounts

Windows 11 Local User Accounts window.

 

I had already created an Amiga account when I took the above screengrab but will pretend I didn’t for the rest of this section so click on ‘Add…’ to continue.

 

No I don’t want to create another Microsoft account…

 

Ignore Microsoft’s recommendation and click on the bit at the bottom which says ‘Sign in without a Microsoft account (not recommended) and then click ‘Next’.

 

I just told you I don’t want one, take the hint!

 

Select the ‘Local account’ option from the bottom of the next window that appears…

 

Microsoft finally took the hint and let me set up a local account.

 

Enter the name for your local account, ‘Amiga’ in my case, a password (twice) and a Password hint in case you forget it (this can’t be skipped unfortunately). Click on ‘Next’ when ready.

 

One local Amiga account all ready to go.

 

This will bring up a confirmation screen with the name of your account. Click ‘Finish’.

 

Mission accomplished.

 

This will bring you back to the User Account window (above) which you can now safely close by clicking on ‘OK’. Your local account is now created and ready to be used in the next section.

 

Creating a Shared Folder

With SMB1 enabled it’s now time to setup a shared folder that your Amiga can actually connect to. Choose a location with enough free space on your PC and create a new folder there. I chose my E: drive as it has plenty of free space but you can choose any location you want. Give it a suitable name.

 

Creating a folder for our share.

 

Now we need to SHARE this folder so right-click on it and select ‘Properties’ and then ‘Advanced Sharing…’

 

Selecting Advanced Sharing

 

Once the Advanced Sharing windows pops up you need to tick the box next to where it says ‘Share this folder’ and then give the share a name in the box below. Try to keep the name short and without spaces or punctuation to avoid any problems connecting to it down the line.

 

Enabling sharing and giving the share a name.

 

Before closing the Advanced Sharing window, click on the ‘Permissions’ button near the bottom.

 

Click permissions.

 

A new window will pop up allowing you add a new user to access the shared folder. To do this click on ‘Add’.

 

Click Add.

 

The will bring up yet another window where you can enter the account name of the user you want to access the share.

Enter the username into the box. My local user account was called ‘Amiga’ so I entered ‘Amiga’ in this box. You can click the ‘Check Names’ button on the right to make sure you have done this correctly. If you’ve made a mistake Windows will say ‘name not found’ which means it cannot find an account with that name. Time to check your spelling! Click on OK when done.

 

Add YOUR local user account name.

 

You will be back looking at the Share Permission window again now and you should see the username of the account you just added at the top of the list (see below). Make sure it is selected and then click the empty box next to ‘Full Control’ to grant your Amiga this permission, then click ‘Apply’ then ‘OK’..

By the way, if you are not aware of the name of your computer, you will see it here. It’s the name in the brackets before the backslash (GAMING-RIG in my case) – jot it down as you will need it later!

 

Giving your local account full control of the share.

 

You should end up with a window looking like the one above. Click OK when you are happy everything looks correct and then on OK once more to get back to the main properties window as shown below. Were are nearly there now – just one last thing to do.

Click on the ‘Security’ tab (highlighted below).

 

Select the Security tab.

 

Next click on the ‘Edit’ button…

 

Click Edit.

 

Then click on the ‘Add’ button…

 

Click Add.

 

Then just as you did before, enter the same local account username into the box so we can define the permissions this user should have. Once done, click on OK.

 

Enter YOUR local account name once more.

 

Back in the Permissions window make sure that the user is highlighted in the top section and then click on the box next to ‘Full Control’ to grant them full access to the share.

 

Ensure all the boxes are ticked.

 

Click on OK and then OK again. Congratulations, you have just created a shared folder on your PC and granted access to it from the local user account you created earlier. Time to get back to the Amiga!

 

Connecting to the Shared Folder from your Amiga

 

With the share created, a local account setup, SMBFS installed to C: and SMBMounter installed on your Amiga we are ready for the final piece of the puzzle; configuring SMBMounter.

 

access a network share on the Amiga

Note the two different versions of SMBMounter (with and without MUI).

 

There are actually two versions of SMBMounter included, a regular one and one that utilises MUI. They both perform exactly the same functions but I prefer the layout of the MUI version so that’s what I’ll be using here.

 

Use the ‘Remove’ button shown above to get rid of the supplied mount entries.

 

The program comes with a few mounts already configured but they are years out of date and no longer work so delete all of them before going any further to keep things neat and tidy. To delete them simply highlight each one in turn and click on the ‘Remove’ button (see photo above).

 

Preferences menu.

 

Next, open up the Preferences window (accessible from the menu – shown above) to configure a few parameters.

We haven’t bothered installing Samba but to prevent it from complaining I set the path here for it to ‘C:’. The path to SMBFS should be set to ‘C:smbfs’. Note you can browse to the location using the file browser icon on the right of each box if you prefer.

 

access a network share on the Amiga

Editing the preferences.

 

The default workgroup is actually set to ‘WORKGROUP’ and you can probably leave it as is. However I do actually have a workgroup configured on my network so I entered the name of it here; ‘LYONSDEN’. The rest of the settings can be left alone. Double check you have entered everything correctly and then click on ‘Save’ to have it remember your settings and move on.

 

access a network share on the Amiga

Entering the settings for our share.

 

The final hurdle is to configure the connection to our shared folder. Click on ‘New’ and then enter the details of your share using the guidance below to help you.

 

SMBMounter Configuration
  • Name – this is an arbitrary label for the connection as it will appear in the SMBMounter list. (Like the connections it came with when you first installed it for example). I called mine ‘PC Share’ but you can call yours anything you want..
  • Workgroup – this will default to WORKGROUP and you can leave it like this but I entered the name of my own workgroup; ‘LYONSDEN’.
  • Hostname – this is the name of your PC, in my case ‘Gaming-Rig’. If you are unsure what it is refer back to the section in red where I told you to make a note of it during the ‘Creating a Shared Folder’ section.
  • Service – this is the name of the shared folder we created earlier, in my case ‘AmigaNet’.
  • Username – this is the name of the local user account we created earlier, in my case ‘Amiga’.
  • Password – the password we set for the local user account earlier.
  • Volume – this is the name you want the share to have on your Amiga. This is like naming your hard drives when you use HDToolbox. Whatever name you enter here is the name that will appear on workbench when the drive is mounted.
  • Automount at Start-up – self explanatory really. I leave this off as I don’t always want the share connected, especially if I just want to play some WHDLoad games for example.
  • Prompt for Login – this is an alternative to having the username and password stored and entered automatically. If ticked it will ask you to login with a username and password every time you want to connect. I leave this feature off as it’s would be a pain for me to do this all the time.

 

Once you’ve entered all the above details and checked they are all correct click on OK. Be sure to ‘Save all mounts’ from the Project menu before proceeding so you don’t lose all those settings when rebooting your Amiga.

 

Saving your mount settings.

 

Now for the moment of truth! Click on the ‘Mount’ button in SMBMounter and if you’ve done everything correctly the share should appear on your Workbench after a couple of seconds. (Note – the icon that appears for you will differ depending on what icon packs and settings you are using).

 

access a network share on the Amiga

Success – an icon like this on your Workbench means your share is connected!

 

You can use this drive just like you would any other. Drag and drop files into it, off it, delete them, save stuff there, even change the drive icon. It’s accessible from other programs just like a regular Amiga partition too so you can use it in Directory Opus, Wordworth or whatever other stuff you use.

 

My SMB Share – 1.2Tb free!

 

As can be seen in the image above the Amiga is able to recognise the full capacity of the shared folder, that’s 1.2 Terabytes in my case – an insane amount of storage for any Amiga.

Quick Troubleshooting Tips

If you get any errors, such as ‘access denied’ or ‘incorrect username/password’ you will need to double check that you have entered the correct and IDENTICAL username and password in both SMBMounter and Windows. Likewise you might need to double check the name of the share in each and so on.

If you’ve done all that find that you cannot connect at all, or if one day in the future it all stops working then your firewall may well be to blame…

 

Firewalls

A real quick way to prove whether your firewall is at fault is to just disable it and try to connect again. If it works then you have found the problem – if not then at least you’ve ruled something out. Make sure you turn it back on after testing though!

Assuming your firewall is to blame, to fix the problem you are going to need to find a way to allow traffic to flow between your Amiga and PC. I’m afraid there’s no single magic bullet for this – there’s too many variables at play. All I can do is explain how I got around this problem myself. Networking is a pretty complex topic and well beyond the scope of this post to explain everything.

Anyway I use Norton 360 which has it’s own firewall (by default Windows 10/11 use Windows Defender) and it decided to block my Amiga from accessing my share after my Internet went down and my router rebooted. I couldn’t even ping my PC from my Amiga so I knew something wasn’t right.

 

Adding a trusted device in Norton 360’s Firewall settings.

 

Norton 360’s firewall allows you to add trusted devices that are allowed to connect to your PC irrespective of any other rules that may exist. To do this you must enter either the IP address of your Amiga or the MAC address of the network card you are using in it. This is probably the best method for most users as the MAC address of the card will never change and it is easy to find. Most cards will have their MAC address displayed on a label affixed to them somewhere. Finding out your Amiga’s IP address is not always so straightforward and unless you possess the knowledge of how to make it static you are going to keep having this issue over and over. Why? Because the IP will change frequently and your firewall will no longer know it should be trusted.

 

Adding a trusted device in Norton 360’s Firewall settings.

 

As I knew what my Amiga’s IP was (using the Roadie GUI for Roadshow) and I knew how to make IP reservations on my router (so my Amiga always gets the same IP) I used the IP address to configure my firewall as shown above.

 

Using Roadie to find out my Amiga’s IP address.

 

After adding my Amiga as a trusted device I was able to ping my PC and connect to the share immediately.

If you too are experiencing firewall issues then hopefully my experience has given you enough pointers to sort them out for yourself. You might have to do some Googling but at least you should have an idea of what to search for!

 

Transfer Speeds & Conclusion

Transfer speeds are not as fast as the internal Compact Flash HD using the SCSI.device interface. I timed a few different file transfer operations to give some practical examples. A 3.5Mb LHA archive file copied from DH0: to DH1: took 6 seconds to transfer. It took the same time to transfer to my RAM Disk. That exact same file took 49 seconds to transfer to the SMB shared folder across the network. This is to be expected though – my A1200 is using a really old 10Base-T network card.

 

Guess who got an Apple Watch for Christmas and wanted an excuse to use it?

 

For the sake of completeness I timed transferring the same file to an SD card using my SDBox device. That took 26 seconds, so basically twice as fast as the SMB share. However that isn’t accessible to the PC when it’s in the Amiga and vice versa, plus there’s the faffing around swapping the card from one reader to another so probably slower all things considered.

In reality for most regular sized Amiga files you probably won’t notice much of a lag in moving them around at all. An ADF image takes 13 seconds to transfer which is perfectly acceptable in my view. Besides, these timings are missing the point really. The sheer convenience of having a drive that you can use to share files ‘on the fly’ between your PC(s) and Amiga(s) trumps any small time penalties experienced whilst doing so.

I have access to floppy disks, Zip disks, CDR’s, SD cards, PCMCIA CF cards but I choose to use the SMB Shared Folder most of the time when transferring stuff to and from my Amiga. It just works and its really convenient. That should speak volumes about the usefulness of such a setup so if you have the resources available, go for it!

Anyway I hope this article helps a few at least a few people access a network share on the Amiga. Let me know of your successes (or fails!) by leaving a reply below.

Getting an A1200 Online Part 1 – Adding a Network Card

In this guide I’m going to document how I got my Amiga A1200 online. I’ll cover installing a network card and configuring a TCP/IP Stack. I’ll also cover installing a Web browser and email program and maybe a few other bits and bobs too.

Prerequisites

  • Amiga OS 3.1.4 is already installed on my A1200 so this guide will reflect that.
  • My system includes a SCSI CDROM as part of my setup which I will be using to transfer larger files across in the early stages.
  • I have access to a floppy drive on my PC system that can format, read and write 720k DS/DD floppy disks that my Amiga can also read.

These are not all essential but if you intend to follow the guide you may need to find an alternative means of doing certain things as a result.

The Network Card

There are a few different options when it comes to network devices for non ‘big-box’ Amigas. On my A500 for example I’ve used a Plipbox device which plugs into the parallel port. There’s also the really old school option of using a serial Modem and a dial-up connection (there are still some companies that offer dial-up!)

However since I’ve freed up the PCMCIA port in my A1200 by replacing my Squirrel with a Blizzard SCSI Kit I decided to go for a PCMCIA ethernet card. Although PCMCIA technology is now obsolete there are still plenty of cards knocking around. I found a few in a ‘junk’ box that I used in Windows 98/XP laptops around the turn of the century. They’re usually available quite cheaply on eBay too. As a general rule it would appear 10Base-T cards are most likely to work whilst 100Base-T ones should be avoided.

After a rummage through my box and checking Aminet I settled on the old 3COM 10Base-T card shown below.

Amiga A1200 online

My Ethernet card.

Driver

The part number is 3C562D and there is a SANA-II driver on Aminet that supports this card (and a whole bunch of others).

The driver can be found here: Aminet – driver/net/3c589.lha.

Below I’ve included a list of all the cards supported by this driver. If you are trying to get hold of a card yourself then make sure it is one of the models listed to avoid disappointment.

3C5623, C562B, 3C562C, 3C562D, 3C563B, 3C563C, 3C563D, 3C589B, 3C589C, 3C589D, 3C589E, 3C3FEM556C, 3CCE589EC, 3CCE589ET, 3CCEM556, 3CCEM556B, 3CXE589D, 3CXE589EC, 3CXEM556.

Amiga A1200 online

Back of my Ethernet card with model information.

Installing the Card

Installing the card couldn’t be simpler, it just slots into the PCMCIA slot on the left-hand side of the Amiga. It will only fit one way (usually label side up) so don’t force it. The Ethernet ‘tail’ plugs into an adjacent RJ-45 socket or in my case a cheap and cheerful little 5-port switch under my desk.

Trendnet Gigabit Switch

My cheap and cheerful Gigabit switch.

However I wasn’t terribly happy with how the card and the tail hung over the edge of my desk. With the connecter on the ethernet cable already being quite fragile it just looked like an accident waiting to happen. Sooner or later I was probably going to catch that cable and snap the connecter off!

Amiga A1200 online

Accident waiting to happen.

Obviously I wasn’t alone in thinking this as a search online lead me to an pre-existing solution. This little gizmo I found on eBay takes the PCMCIA slot and twists it through 90 degrees so that cards can be inserted flat against the side of the machine.

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With the card fitted this way I no longer had to worry about snapping the connector off. Cabling was also streamlined thanks to the ‘tail’ now facing the back of my desk.

Amiga A1200 online

Ethernet card fitted to the PCMCIA adapter. Much better.

Installing the Software

Having downloaded the driver off Aminet on my Windows 10 PC I needed a way of transferring this to my A1200. For this task I used my trusty 720K PC formatted floppy disk to move the file across.

Amiga CrossDOS disk.

Putting files onto a PC formatted ‘CrossDOS’ disk on the PC.

I used a USB floppy drive on the PC side and CrossDOS (which is part of Amiga OS 3.1.4) on the Amiga to read the disk. This method only works for files smaller than 720k (the max capacity of DD disks on PC) but the LHA archive was only 54K so not a problem.

Amiga CrossDOS disk.

Using a PC formatted ‘CrossDOS’ disk on the Amiga.

The LHA archive unpacked to a single ‘3c589’ directory that contained the installer for the driver.

Amiga A1200 online

This is what the unpacked archive should look like.

Running the installer was very straightforward, there were no options that needed to be tweaked.

Amiga A1200 online

Running the 3c589 installer.

I simply clicked on ‘proceed’ a couple of times to complete the installation, whereupon it informed me that the driver could be found in the DEVS:networks directory.

Amiga A1200 online

Installation complete.

That’s all there was to it for the network card driver installation. However there’s one more thing that needs installing which I’ll explain below.

PCMCIA Bug Fix

Unfortunately there’s a bug in the implementation of the PCMCIA slot on the A1200 that was never fixed. It’s nothing major but it can cause a few irritations if not dealt with. Basically it’s supposed to be a hot-pluggable system and cards should be reset automatically when inserted. However the bug prevents this from happening so you can be left in a situation where the card stops working and requires a full power cycle of the A1200 to fix. For me this manifested itself each time I reset my Amiga using ‘CTRL A A’. It happened frequently enough to encourage me to look for a solution.

Fortunately there’s a fix available Aminet which requires the installation of two command line programs called CardPatch & CardReset. They’re available here:

Aminet – util/boot/CardPatch.lha

Aminet – util/boot/CardReset.lha

There’s no dedicated installer for them so they need configuring manually.

Once I had the LHA archives on my Amiga I extracted them to my RAM Disk. The CardPatch and CardReset commands need copying to C: and this can be achieved by opening up a Shell window and entering the following two commands:

COPY RAM:CardPatch C:

COPY RAM:CardReset C:

Amiga PCMCIA Bug

Copying commands to C:

Now we need to get these commands to run during the Amiga’s boot-up so that the card will work after a system reset. To do this we need to edit the Amiga’s ‘startup-sequence’ file. You can either use your editor of choice or the one built into AmigaOS.

To use the built in editor to amend the startup-sequence enter the following command:

Ed S:Startup-Sequence

Amiga PCMCIA Bug

Command to use the built-in editor to amend the startup-sequence.

This will open up the file ‘startup-sequence’ into the editor ready to edit. Now add the following 2 lines near the beginning of the file after the SetPatch command:

CardPatch

CardReset

As shown in the screenshot below. I’ve also added a comment (indicated by the use of a semi-colon) to remind me what these commands do for future reference but this is entirely optional. Don’t worry if your startup-sequence looks different. Every setup will differ depending on what hardware and software you’ve installed on it.

Amiga PCMCIA Bug

Add these lines to the startup-sequence.

To exit and save the changes press Esc, then press x and finally press enter. Alternatively select ‘Save and Exit’ from the Project menu.

And that wraps up Part 1 of this guide for now. In Part 2 I’ll go through setting up a TCP/IP stack which will finally connect our A1200 to the Internet!

Network your Commodore 64

I’ve had my 1541 Ultimate II+ cart for around a year now. It’s a fantastic modern addition to my Commodore 64 and one that I certainly wouldn’t ever want to be without. However in all that time I’ve never bothered to explore using its built-in Ethernet port. Well the other day I finally got around to setting it up and am really glad I did too. I thought I’d share my experience in case it can help someone else get more out of their device. Basically this post will explain how to network your Commodore 64   (with a 1541 Ultimate II) to copy your games, music, demos, documents or anything else straight to your 1541 Ultimate II without ever needing to swap USB drives around.

 

Connecting to your network

You may have noticed the red ‘Link Down’ status that appears on screen when you press the menu button on your Ultimate cart. The is basically the built-in network card of the device telling you that it’s not connected to anything. The ‘MAC’ with the 12 Hexadecimal codes along side is the ‘MAC Address’ of your cart in case you need to find it on your network router.

 

Network your Commodore 64

‘Link Down’ Status shown in red

 

All you need to do to network your Commodore 64 is connect it to your router with an [amazon_textlink asin=’B00J3UYNII’ text=’Ethernet cable’ template=’ProductLink’ store=’lyonsden-21′ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’885964d9-fae3-11e8-9619-05a5a6b29c97′]. Providing your router is configured to use DHCP (and by default, pretty much all of them are) your cart should pick up an IP address on your network straight away.

 

Network your Commodore 64

Ethernet cable plugged in. Note the Green link/activity light. This should blink on and off.

 

After you have plugged the cable in you should see a green activity light appear on the device itself. You should also see an IP address appear on the menu screen and the red ‘Link Down’ status should change to a green ‘Link Up’.

 

Network your Commodore 64

‘Link Up’ Confirmation Status and IP address shown

 

FTP Software

So far so good, but it’s still not much use at the moment. To be useful you’re going to need some FTP software on your PC. I’ll use Filezilla as an example as it’s free and easy to use. The principal will be the same regardless of what software you choose to use. (As a side note I normally use Directory Opus which is still going strong – only just for PC’s these days rather than the Amiga). Note, if you are going to download and install Filezilla it’s just the client you want, not the server version. Also make sure you un-tick any boxes during the install to avoid any unwanted ‘bundled extras’ being installed (one of my pet peeves these days). The FTP software is going to allow you to connect to the USB storage device that is plugged in to the 1541 Ultimate II and transfer files across.

 

Network your Commodore 64

Configuring the FTP software to connect to your C64

 

Adding your C64 as a ‘site’

Once you’ve got your FTP software up and running you need to add a new ‘site’ to it (basically your 1541 Ultimate II). Simply got to the ‘File’ menu and select ‘Site Manager’ and then click on ‘New Site’. Give the site a suitable name so you’ll be able to recognise it easily in future. I simply called mine ‘C64’. Now make sure all the various settings below are entered. These have already been entered in the screenshot above.

 

  • Protocol: FTP
  • Host: (this will be the IP address displayed on YOUR C64 screen)
  • Port: (you can leave this blank)
  • Encryption: Only use plain FTP (insecure). (You are only transferring stuff within your own home network so this is not an issue)
  • Logon Type: Anonymous

 

Once you’ve checked that all the above settings are correct, click on ‘connect’. The new site you’ve just created will be saved and it should connect to your Ultimate cart and display something similar to the screenshot below.

 

Network your Commodore 64

FTP software – PC on the left, C64 on the right

 

The top window is basically a scrolling log of the actions performed by the FTP software and is just for info purposes. The two areas highlighted in blue and red above are where you can get stuff done. The left hand side is your PC and the right hand side your C64, or rather the USB drive plugged into your 1541 Ultimate II. The upper window on each side is where you can browse through the directories / folders whilst the lower section shows you the contents of them.

 

How to actually transfer games onto your C64!

To transfer games across to your C64 all you need to do is click through to where they are stored on your PC in the left window, where you want them to go in the right window, and then simply drag and drop them over, it’s that simple.

 

Network your Commodore 64

Files being transfer over FTP

 

In the above screenshot I’ve dragged a bunch of Rob Hubbard SID tunes across from my PC to my 1541 Ultimate II’s USB drive. You can see a log of what is happening in the top window and view the individual files’ transfer progress in the bottom window.

 

Network your Commodore 64

The files on my C64 after being transferred across

 

The file transfers are really fast, taking just a few seconds so I find this a really quick and convenient way of getting new software onto my C64 without constantly faffing about with a flash drive. I definitely won’t be unplugging that USB drive from my 1541 Ultimate anytime soon now!

 

Reservations

One other thing you should probably do is to ‘reserve’ your C64’s IP address on your router. Most routers offer the facility to do this. This will ensure that every time you turn your C64 on it will pick up the same IP. If you don’t, it will likely get a different one each time and you will need to change the connection info in the FTP software.

 

Apparently you can also connect to the 1541 Ultimate using Telnet and use it for stuff life swapping disk images on the fly for multi-disk games. I might explore this in the future but I doubt it would be something I’d use much, unlike transferring files across which I do on a regular basis. Anyway I hope this has helped you to network your Commodore 64. If you have any questions or comments please do get in touch.