Development update

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Work is proceeding towards a 1.1 release.

Some upcoming planned and/or implemented features:

  • Native ability to view contents of D64 files and extract the files contained within
  • OpenCBM utilities bundled within the app bundle on the Mac platform
  • Copy multiple PRG files to a connected drive in one operation

It can be challenging to write and debug a piece of software designed to communicate with specific hardware without having the hardware at my disposal. To that end, I’ve ordered a USB Teensy board, and my friend George is going to donate a 1541, an IEC cable, and some disks to me so I can test locally without having to send him previews or remote into his machine. This should hopefully speed up the development process.

For those that are interested, I’ll be using the USB Teensy to build an XUM1541 interface. The commercially available version is called the ZoomFloppy, but using the Teensy gives me a bit more flexibility, and can always be repurposed in the future if I no longer need to use it as an xum1541.

QtCBM 1.0.0 Released!

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Announcing the 1.0.0 release of QtCBM, a GUI interface to the CBM command line tools heavily inspired by the original GUI4CBM4WIN interface, but written from scratch against the open source Qt GUI library enabling modern looks and features.

Along with the 1.0.0 release come builds for Linux and Mac OS X. You can find them on the Downloads page.

QtCBM 0.9.9 Released

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This is the first release candidate – I believe we’re now feature complete with the GUI4CBM4WIN plus the additions made in QtCBM. Once this is bug-tested and any fixes are made it will be 1.0.0.

Main change in this release: copy individual files from CBM disk.

QtCBM 0.9.5 Released

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Announcing the immediate availability of 0.9.5

Notable changes:

  • Remove built-in custom cbmctrl.exe
  • Support –raw in versions of cbmctrl.exe > 0.4.2
  • Allow copying individual PRG files to disk
  • Enable and honour the preference to perform a directory list after a copy operation

QtCBM 0.9.1 Released

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Provide a system action so that on .D64 files, one can select “Write.D64 with QtCBM” or similar which opens QtCBM and confirms the operation then uses d64copy to copy the image to the disk.

Mac version availablility

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As I am developing this in Qt on my main development machine (a Mac Mini) and building the Windows builds in a Windows 7 VM, I will be able to make the Mac version available if there is enough interest, but as I don’t actually have any Commodore hardware to test it with, the interoperability of the Mac version would be untested. Once we reach 1.0 status, I’ll consider putting a DMG up for Mac use as well.

As far as that goes, if there is interest for it, a Linux version could be built as well.

QtCBM 0.8.1 Released

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When I asked my friend George if he had any ideas for a software project I could work on, he suggested an improved Windows front-end GUI to the OpenCBM tools popular among enthusiasts of classic Commodore computers. So taking the existing GUI tool as a blueprint, I set off using modern software development tools to create an improved version. The result is QtCBM which you can download from the Downloads page above.