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. Basically it 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 when being software supported. 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. Other speeders requiring a parallel cable of some kind may be covered at Kernal ROMs.

Formel 64 also had a parallel cable mounted directly to the cartridge but the cable was to our knowledge only supported by the internal cartridge software. Formel 64 is still missing! :)

A drive with a parallel cable added may also well serve for faster transfers to the PC using e.g. StarCommander or NIBtools and an appropriate interface (XM-1541 comes to mind here).

Most tasks faced on a C64 system may very well be defeated without a parallel cable especially since nowadays defacto kernal rom speeder is the serially working JiffyDOS. The cable however can be an excellent aid 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 (includes building instructions for Speed DOS and copier program compatible 1541 and 1570/1571 parallel cables)