Brent's World Forums

Are you an aspiring SysOp who has always dreamed of running an IMAGE BBS, or C-Net bulletin Board System, but did not have the money to purchase such exotic equipment?

Back in the day, a 40 MB LT. Kernel Hard Drive for the Commodore 64 cost around $799 new, if you owned a C-128 and needed the C=128 daughter board, that was extra! CMD came along later with a cheaper, more compatible, and larger hard drive, but it remained out of reach of most C= Users at the time. It did not help that for less money, you could buy a cheaper PC system to run something like WWIV or Telegard BBS.

LT Kernel and CMD hard drive emulation has finally come to emulation. VICE 3.5 now supports full LT. Kernel and CMD Hard Drive support (All you need is the roms!)..

This post will focus solely on getting the CMD emulation up and running.

I have attached the CMD HD-Utils disk and the manual. The ROMs are available at Jim Brains' website, and I highly recommend you supporting the community and purchasing the ROM image. http://store.go4retro.com/commodore/cmd ... ary-image/.

You will also want to either purchase the JIffyDOS kernel ROMS, or emulate the RAMLink from the previous post to get full speed out out of the hard drive.

Once you purchase the ROMs, let's get started!

Copy your ROM image file to someplace you will know where it is. I have mine in the main VICE directory in a folder called ROMs

Next, load either 64SC, or SCPU64. (We will use 64SC for this post.).
Go to Preferences > Settings > Machine > ROM
Click on the Drive ROMs tab.
Looking at the list of Drives, you will see the CMD HD. Click the browse button to the right then locate your CMD Hard Drive Boot ROMs. Double Click on the file in the list to the left, or single click and click the Open button in the lower left hand corner.


We should be taken back to the settings window. Click on the triangle to the left of Peripheral devices, and select Drive.
Here we will choose which device # we want our CMD Hard Drive to be - 8,9,10, or 11. I have chosen Device 9. Click on the corresponding tab, and click the CMD HD radio button.


First we must decide where the Hard Drive File will reside. Go to your File Explorer, and choose a place for this file to live. For the sake of this demo I will use C:\drives (you can create it anywhere you want..).

Create a blank text file. Right click anywhere in the file explore window and left click on New > Text Document.


A new notepad file will appear.


Rename it CMD-HD.dhd (replacing the .txt file extension).
Click YES in the dialog box that will appear.


Okay! Now we have our Hard Drive .dhd file created.. Now we have to attach it, and format it so the CMD-HD will know what to do with it.

Go back to VICE.

Select File > Attach Disk Image > Drive 9


You're Image file is now attached.. Yes I know the drive is still blinking.. No problem! We now must format the drive using the utility provided on the cmdhdtools disk image.

Mount the cmdhdtool.d64 image in drive 8.


We want to load the create sys.

So type LOAD"CREATE SYS",8,1

Type Run.

Hit Enter..


I am not sharing the hard drive with other systems, so I answer N at the next screen.

Let Create Sys do its thing. When it is done your screen will look like the picture below.


Place the drive in "CONFIGURATION MODE"
Look on the bottom right hand on the VICE screen and find the drive # you have configured for your CMD HD. In my configuration I use device 9

Left click the drive # in your status bar.


Click Reset Drive #9 to Configuration Mode.

Press the "ANY" key.. To continue...


Start out by setting the Default Device #.. Press 1.


You will see the device is already set to 9. So I will choose N.

Moving along, let us select #4 to create our first partition.

The CMD-HD support 7 types of partitions.

1 - ) Native, Supports partition size from 256 BLOCKS up to 65280 (16MB). Support for CMD partitions
2 - ) 1541 - Emulated a 1541 disk, with 664 blocks
3 - ) 1571 - Emulated 1571 Partition with 1328 blocks free.BUF
4 - ) 1581 - Emulated 1581 partition with 3160 blocks free, 1581 subdirectories supported.
5 - ) 1581-C - Not sure about this one.. If anyone can fill me in.. Please comment.
6 - ) PBUF - Print Buffer - Used for the CMD print buffer featrues.. As far as I know this was never implemented.
7 - ) FORN - If you also have your CMD hard drive attached to a Non-Commodore computer, you can setup partitions to be used on that computer. I mean why would you need 4GBs just for your Commodore 64/128..

So now lets create a partition.

First your cursor will be on Partition type. Just hit enter on the default here. You use your minus (-) or plus (+) keys to select one of the 7 partitions types noted above.

Next, lets create a 16MB (Maximum size.) partition. press your minus key (Unless you want to watch the numbers spin up to 65280. Press Enter.

Now, let's name the partition.. I use DEMO PARTITION FOR THIS DOCUMENTATION, you can name it anything you want. Enter the name and press ENTER.


Once you are finished answering the above, you will be asked to write the new table to the HD. Type - Y.

If the partitioning was successful, you will be presented with the following screen.



Press any key to return to the HD-TOOLS screen.

When you are done with the HD-TOOLS program, and exit to basic. Do not forget to reset the drive.

Click again on the drive indicator in the status bar and select Reset Drive # x.

Now if we do a load "$",9 we should see the partition we created.



Let us now set the Hard Drives Real Time Clock, this will be used to write a time a date stamp on your files, and set the clock on certain BBS programs if you run one.

load "set hd clock",8 (Or whatever device you attached your hdtools.d64 image on).

Enter the device number of your CMD hard drive and press enter.



Use the - and + keys to set the hard drives real time clock and hit enter when done.

Once these steps have been completed, you how have a fully functioning emulated CMD-HD on your VICE installation.. Enjoy!

If you wish to have your CMD-HD image be attached when VICE is loaded, add the following to the command line.

-<DEVICE NUMBER> "<IMAGE PATH\IMAGE NANEM>.dhd"

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This is the third time I have created this tutorial. phpBB and MySQL are not very tolerant of power interruptions. This time it was a bad cloths iron, and the fact that ALL of the electrical outlets in my apartment on on the same circuit.. I will be backing up the blog, forum, and databases as soon as this is saved. I would like to thank Game Master for sending me the files necessary to recreate the post.

Please check out my Image 3.0 BBS, by connecting to bbs.catracing.org 6400. You are more than welcome to create an account here on the forms as well and participate in the discussions.

I bought my ROMs from Jim this afternoon and I can't wait to finally try out a virtual version of an item I've drooled over since I first laid eyes on the price sheet for one in a flyer... Thanks Brent for this thorough writeup - I can't wait to try it out.

Cube Inc.

Wow. I will say it again - WOW! I spent many hours yesterday playing with my new virtual CMD hard drive, (and Jiffy DOS - the other set of ROMs I purchased from Jim to go with the CMD boot ROM) and I cannot get over the speed! I built two DS2 boards, one from the pair of disks released by Vendetta and the other from another pair which I had acquired somewhere along my travels, and I cannot believe the speed - not to mention the size. It is everything I always dreamed it would be and more, because in my dreams the CMD topped out at 200 MB!

Thank you again for making this write-up, you've given me a lot more to play with and enjoy on the Commodore and now I have some more things to post about on the DS2 front.

Cube Inc.

Thank you sir for the kudos!!

I always try so hard to give back to the system, and community that has brought me so much joy over the years!

Thank you for your contribution to the Rat's Den BBS, and now my blog forums! Much appreciated.

I did want to ask, if you also are emulating the RAMLINK?

If not, I highly recommend you do so, as it emulates the faster parallel connection with the CMD Hard Drive, and you have the added bonus of setting up Autobooting through the RAMLink.

To answer your question, no - I haven't been emulating a RamLink, but I will have to give it a try... In all my years of dreaming about CMD gear, if a hard drive was ever out of my means, the RAMLink was even less likely to ever adorn the back of my '64... I'm guessing I'll have to find a ROM somewhere as with the CMD-HD? I didn't see any RAMLink roms on Retro Innovations, and Google hasn't really turned anything up, are these hard to come by?

And as for participation - you are very welcome! : )

.rom should have been included in my post.

Yes, I found it after a well-deserved face palm brought me back to your post and realized it was there the whole time. ; )

I'm so embarrassed, I don't know what to say...

Hidden in plain sight!